The Department of Physics is currently enjoying one of the most productive and promising periods in its history – due, in part, to the efforts of Francis Gasparini, distinguished professor and chair of the physics department, and his guidance in hiring new faculty members.
When Gasparini came to UB in 1973, the department was in a state of disrepair and disorganization. At the time, it was still located on South Campus and was understaffed.
According to Gasparini, things started to turn around when the department moved to it its current North Campus location at Fronczak Hall and began hiring many new faculty members in the past five years.
'We were able to increase the number of faculty in the department at one time from 21 to 32,' Gasparini said. 'That increase brought in a lot of new talent and a lot of people, and has allowed us to offer new courses and do different things which we simply couldn't do before because we didn't have the manpower to do it.'
The energy brought by the new hires has been the driving force behind all of the recent progress, Gasparini said.
One manifestation of the new faculty members' capacity to bring about change has been their ability to obtain grants, a critical talent in the area of physics research. Good 'grantsmenship,' as Gasparini calls it, is the result of a few important factors.
'It's a combination of things,' Gasparini said. 'You have to have a record of research that you can base your proposed research on. You have to have a track record of having done good work and having [it] published. And then you have to have a good idea, which is a take-off or extension of previous research.'
The new members of the department are finding success in obtaining research funding. Currently, five young faculty members have CAREER grants, a prestigious award given by the National Science Foundation to deserving junior faculty members. According to Gasparini, having five people in one department with these grants is unheard of in the research community.
The new hires have gotten recognition from parties outside of the department as well, Gasparini said. When external evaluators came in to look at the physics department, they said that the young faculty members were 'competitive and outstanding' in comparison to many other universities with larger departments, according to Gasparini.
Gasparini has worked with some of the new faculty on his research projects over the past few years. For most of his time at UB, his research has focused on the unique properties of helium-4 and helium-3 as they approach absolute zero, the coldest theoretically possible temperature. They are the only substances that stay in liquid form when nearing this temperature. As a result, they exhibit some very unusual properties, some of which remain unexplored.
According to Gasparini, the results he obtained from his research on helium-3 and helium-4 can also be used in trying to answer some questions about other areas where actual experimentation is not possible.
'You might look at them as a playground for understanding things which you cannot do with other systems,' Gasparini said. 'They are like a prototype of a problem, that if you can solve it in [one place], then it will give some guidance as to what happens in other places.'
With the direction of Gasparini and the work of his young faculty members, the physics department is continuing to grow and make progress. Though Gasparini feels they are still not quite where they should be in terms of the size of the faculty, they are currently looking for new hires and plan to be there in the near future.
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
