Kudos

Paul Bauer, director of the NIU School of Music, was elected to a three-year term on the Committee on Ethics of the National Association of Schools of Music.

Founded in 1924, NASM is an organization of schools, conservatories, colleges and universities that establishes national standards for undergraduate and graduate degrees and other credentials. The Reston, Va.-based association has 610 institutional members.

Bauer was elected at the group’s 82nd annual meeting, held in Chicago during November.

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NIU Women’s Studies Director Amy Levin has been appointed to a special committee conducting long-range strategic planning for the National Women’s Studies Association.

The committee is part of a $275,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Other members of the committee include the executive director, president and vice president of the professional association as well as Beverly Guy Sheftall, whose research on African-American women is nationally recognized.

Levin has been chair of NWSA’s strategic planning committee since 2003.

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NIU’s Pati Sievert, who coordinates the popular Frontier Physics outreach program for the physics department, has been selected by the American Association of Physics Teachers to serve as its 2007 Chair of the Committee on Science Education for the Public.

The committee stages workshops on outreach and other aspects of science education. In recent years, Sievert has been leading workshops on NIU’s successful outreach efforts to physics educators from across the country.

NIU’s Frontier Physics presents a traveling road show of eye-popping physics demonstrations. Physics department faculty and students have made about 300 presentations to more than 25,000 K-12 students across the northern Illinois region.

Frontier Physics also stages the annual Haunted Physics Laboratory in advance of Halloween. This past year, it drew more than 700 visitors to campus. The show has been so successful that other universities and high schools are modeling the NIU effort.

Sievert also works with Project REAL, a federally funded program aiming to enhance teacher quality in Rockford public schools.

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NIU physicists Roland Winkler and Dimitrie Culcer spent the early part of this month in Taiwan, where they were invited to speak at an international workshop on spin physics.

The workshop, organized by Taiwan’s National Center for Theoretical Sciences, was held at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsin-Chu. The event brought together top scientists from across the world to exchange insights and foster collaborations in the field of spintronics. The emerging technology looks to develop devices that exploit quantum physics, particularly the up-or-down spin property of electrons.

Winkler and Culcer, along with Christian Lechner of Germany, recently published a potentially groundbreaking theory demonstrating how to control the spin of particles without using superconducting magnets.

1-16-07