Department Alum/Advisory Board Chair Doesn't Quit Though the current Chair of the Alumni Advisory Board has just completed his 5-year term on the Board, Bill Anderson, (BS EPHX 1967), doesn't know how to quit when it comes to his daily run. Despite being hospitalized for a ruptured appendix, Bill managed to maintain his 35 year streak of daily 1-mile runs, with a little help from his family. Some of the press he received for his efforts can be found at this link.

New program teaches youngsters nitty-gritty of nanoscale, energy A suite of new educational material at KU, as part of the Nanotechnology for Renewable Energy project, is introducing the world of nanoscale and energy to students in elementary and middle schools. Much of the effort focuses on a new hands-on program for schools at the KU Natural History Museum, where students explore energy through the world of cartoon physics, including falling anvils, giant rubber bands and TNT. The full article can be accessed at this link.

Astronomy Prof/Retired Astronaut Discusses the End of the Shuttle Era Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Steve Hawley, talked with the Lawrence Journal-World about the decommission and retirement of the space shuttle Discovery, which he traveled to space in multiple times, including on the mission 22 years ago that launched the Hubble deep-space telescope. The full article can be accessed at this link.

Department Alumnus Elected Vice Chair of APS Astrophysics Congratulations to Dr. John Beacom (B.S. Physics and Mathematics 1991), who has been elected Vice Chair of the American Physical Society Division of Astrophysics. He will assume the role of Chair next year. John served as a member of the Physics and Astronomy Alumni Advisory Board until he assumed his extensive duties as Director of the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at Ohio State University in 2011.

KU Physics and Astronomy Scores Well in NRC Rankings
The latest survey of graduate programs by the NRC has finally appeared after a multi-year delay, in part due to the more convoluted scheme for evaluating and ranking programs with a probability range rather than a single number. The link on the title of this news item allows one to supply the specific factors that matter to the reader and determine the ranking based upon those weights. In the simplest case scenario, the NRC Survey-Based Quality Score, KU ranked 57th, a dramatic rise from the last full survey in the early 90's where the department was rated in the 90-100 range. More impressive is Research Productivity, where KU ranks 35th in the country out of 161 programs. Finally, among programs with 25 or fewer faculty, KU ranks 9th in Research Productivity out of 52 programs.