UCI’s renowned physics group takes hit in budget crisis

The Orange County Register

August 20th, 2009

By Gary Robbins, science writer-editor

UC Irvine’s physics department, which is ranked among the top 30
in the nation at the graduate level and was home to a Nobel Prize winner,
is cutting $1.2 million to help balance the state budget.

The money is forcing the department to reduce classes, cut back on recruiting for top graduate students and preventing the program from competing for some of the grant money that is the life blood of a research university.

Bill Parker, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, says other programs on campus are taking bigger hits, and that his group will maintain core courses for students.

But the department also has lost three senior professors to retirement, let go of 2 lecturers and eliminated 16 lecture courses. The classes were low enrollment specialty courses, ranging from modern optics to general relativity to advanced mathematical physics.

“Please note that the presence of these special topic courses is what distinguishes the best educational programs from simply good programs,” Parker said in an email.

“…We are not investing in new laboratory equipment for our instructional laboratories nor upgrading the equipment in classrooms,” adds Parker. “Hence the impact will be felt in the future when our courses will become outdated.

“…There are some federal awards for which we have decided not to compete because faculty feared required matching funds would not be provided by the campus.

“… If state resources are not restored soon, the traditional excellence of the University of California in both education and research can not be sustained.”

The physics department was home to the late Frederick Reines, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for co-discovering neutrinos. Current luminaries include Gary Chanan, who played a key role in aligning the mirrors on the Keck Telescopes, Andrew Lankford, a noted leader on the Large Hadron Collider, Steve Barwick, who is known widely for his astronomical research in the Antarctic, and Wilson Ho, a leader designer of powerful microscopes.

The late Fred Reines, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.
Image courtesy of UCI.