Ohio State’s collaborative spirit and great materials research facilities make it, “a place where I could see my research going up to an even higher level.” {Roland Kawakami}
Linda Carpenter
Roland Kawakami
Assistant Professor, Physics PhD—Johns Hopkins Previous Positions—Postdocs: UC-Santa Cruz; UC-Irvine
Professor, Physics PhD—UC–Berkeley Previous Position—Associate Professor (Physics): UC-Riverside
The size of the physics department; numbers of faculty working on Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS experiments; and—the Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (CCAPP); were big draws for Carpenter, who works on the LHC. A theorist, Carpenter says, “My job is to try to predict what particles/forces exist in the universe— and tell experimental physicists what to look for. The nature of my work allows me to interface with work being done at CCAPP and other experiments being done at places like Fermi Gamma Ray Observatory.” Her work depends on talking to other physicists, “So I spend a lot of time traveling to interact with colleagues.” Carpenter grew up in Baltimore and went back and forth between the East and West Coasts doing undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral work. She is happy to have landed here; she enjoys exploring campus and the surrounding community, “I like large cities and I like being in a big university on a big campus where there are exciting things going on all the time.”
A great five-year working relationship with Ohio State’s Center for Emergent Materials inspired Kawakami’s move. Kawakami studies spintronics, the science and technology related to electron “spin.” Although his group at UC-Riverside was recognized as the country’s leading research group in graphenebased spintronics, he believes Ohio State’s collaborative spirit and great materials research facilities make it, “a place where I could see my research going up to an even higher level.” As an undergraduate, Kawakami got hooked by “the elegance of the mathematics and the theoretical framework of physics; I like how it gets to the bottom of how nature works and builds everything from the ground up.” When not in the lab, he likes to cycle, cook, and watch Jeremy Lin’s basketball games. “For cycling, I like the long distances and mountains. I have climbed up the Tour de France mountains like the Alpe d’Huez and Galibier pass and have done 100+ mile rides.” continued on page 12
physics.osu.edu
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