Greetings From the Chair

Dear Alumni and Friends, I am honored to be the new chair of the department of physics, a role that I began this past summer. I have spent the past three years serving as associate chair of graduate programs, and I look forward to serving the greater department for the next three years. I have to begin this letter by thanking the outgoing chair, Prof. Mark Eriksson, for his leadership over the past three years. He oversaw one of the department’s largest expansions in faculty and student numbers we’ve experienced, and I am excited to continue building off the successes he, and previous chairs, have accomplished. I also have to thank the outgoing associate chairs, Profs. Mark Rzchowski and Sridhara Dasu. Mark served as associate chair for the undergraduate program and academic affairs from 2008-2010 and again from 2011 until this past summer. Accomplishing our academic mission could not happen without someone like Mark looking out for our students and instructors. Sridhara has served as associate chair for the Board of Visitors and alumni affairs since 2021 and was department chair for four years prior. I am thus pleased to introduce the new associate chairs team of Profs. Maxim Vavilov (undergraduate program and academic affairs), Keith Bechtol (graduate program), and Brian Rebel (Board of Visitors and alumni affairs). I am excited to work with this new team, and I am confident that the energy they bring will lead to new initiatives to keep the department moving forward. This year, we are thrilled to welcome six new faculty to our department, bringing us to 56 total members and moving us even closer to our goal of 60. These six new members represent a range of expertise and a balance of theory and experimentation. Alum Dan Hooper, PhD ’03 returns to campus as WIPAC Director and professor of physics. Two condensed matter experimentalists, Prof. Britton Plourde and Prof. Tiancheng Song, will build off our already-strong program in that area, boosted by two new condensed matter theorists, Prof. Elio König and Prof. Ben Woods. Finally, astrophysics Prof. Melinda Soares-Furtado joins us on a joint faculty position between the departments of astronomy and physics. We have two active searches underway, one in AMO and one in machine learning/artificial intelligence that is part of a broader campus initiative known as RISE (Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence). UW–Madison is truly a thriving place to be doing physics right now! We are equally excited about the research programs of our current faculty, and the broader physics and science communities seem to agree. Prof. Francis Halzen was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, one of the top recognitions for U.S. scientists. Prof. Baha Balantekin won the 2025 Hans A. Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society, the top annual award for accomplishments in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, and nuclear astrophysics. Prof. Vernon Barger was elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And Prof. Ke Fang was named a Sloan Fellow, an award given to exceptional early-career scientists. Ke was also named the inaugural recipient of our department’s Bernice Durand Faculty Fellowship this year. Of course, with a growing faculty comes the need for more exceptional graduate students, and physics is trending up. We welcomed an incoming PhD class of 43 students. We also welcomed 38 MS in Physics Quantum Computing students, once again the largest class yet and reflecting both the program’s success and the continued need for quantum workforce development. Our department continues to innovate in exciting and creative ways. At the undergraduate level, we recognized that the physics major was narrowly focused on students who are more likely to pursue graduate studies — and in fact, around half our graduates go on to PhD programs each year. However, we know that a physics undergraduate degree prepares students for a wealth of opportunities, especially in industry. After a few years of internal studies and discussion, we have removed the thermal physics requirement, removed the requirement for a second semester of quantum mechanics, and lowered the required number of lab courses from three to two — without reducing the total number of physics credits required — in order to create a more flexible path to a physics major. Our major was already growing, and we expect these new changes will attract even more students. Stay tuned in a few years to hear how this change plays out. Our mission in undergraduate instruction aims to bring innovations in teaching to both our majors and students from other majors who are required to take our service courses. We began offering more summer majors’ courses, easing the path to graduation for students who declare the physics major after their first year. We now offer Physics 103, algebra-based intro physics, as an online summer course, and have quadrupled the number of students we teach compared to in-person summer instruction. Our instructional staff has also worked to revamp or develop new labs — including being awarded a grant to replace some of the old equipment in the general physics labs. In 2023-24, our department taught a total of 29,076 credit hours, representing 4.3% of all credit hours in L&S, both the highest values since 2015-2016. We are also innovating outside academia. Our department members are pursuing more spinoffs and technology licensing than ever before. Prof. Cary Forest and his team’s spinoff company, Realta Fusion, celebrated first plasma in WHAM, their magnetic mirror machine that is at the forefront of fusion energy technology. Prof. Kael Hanson recently started a spinoff company, Navigationis, to develop a new, radiowave-based navigation technique that is immune to the vulnerabilities of GPS. Hanson won a UW–Madison Draper Technology Innovation Fund award to support this new company. Lastly, Prof. Robert McDermott co-founded a superconducting quantum computing company, Qolab, based in Madison. He and Britton Plourde, one of our new hires this year, will both be splitting their time between their faculty appointments and the new company. In fact, amongst other reasons, Plourde cited UW–Madison’s support of entrepreneurialism as one of the reasons he joined the faculty. Our department has a long and proud tradition of physics outreach, starting with the opening of the Ingersoll Physics Museum — the longest operating hands-on science museum in the country — in 1918 and continuing with Prof. Clint Sprott’s The Wonders of Physics shows in 1984. I am pleased to announce that the faculty voted this year to change the museum’s name to The Ingersoll Wonders of Physics Museum. This change reflects the full breadth of educational outreach offered through our department. We hope visitors to any of our many outreach programs are inspired by the Wonders of our exciting discipline. Research, teaching, and outreach are the core values of a public research university, and our department will continue to do excellent, cutting-edge research and teach the next generation of scientists both in and out of the classroom. I want to add one more pillar to our department’s mission: we must make a commitment to diversity and equity an active component of what we do as a department. To be sure, these efforts are not starting with my tenure as Chair, but instead represent a continuation of earlier department leadership. The need to add diversity to our mission became evident to me when I saw the list of department chairs who came before me. I was the 33rd white male chair out of 35. The field of physics, and specifically UW–Madison physics, both lack adequate representation of students from marginalized groups. We need to improve diversity at all levels in this department. There’s no magic wand. It will take a concerted, sustained effort by everyone who has a connection to our department. On, Wisconsin! Kevin Black, Department Chair and Professor of Physics