12:45PM – Miller Room

 

Meeting Agenda

• Participation in the hiring process for a new junior (experimental) condensed matter faculty member
  • Graduate students have been asked to participate in the hiring process for this new faculty member
  • 8 candidates for the job will be giving department colloquium and condensed matter seminars over the next few months
  • For the candidates giving the department colloquia, graduate students are invited to meet and chat with them in the Miller Room from 3:30 – 4:00 (with cookies, coffee, & tea)
  • The candidates names and visit dates are listed below
    • Norman Mannella (Thursday Feb. 1, 4:15 colloquium)
      Stanford University
      ‘Colossal magnetoresistive manganites and high temperature superconductors: so different, yet so similar’
    • Janelle Leger (Thursday Feb. 8, 4:15 colloquium)
      University of Washington
      ‘Optoelectronic devices based on a semiconducting polymer homojunction’
    • Xuan Gao (Wednesday Feb. 14, 4:15 colloquium)
      Harvard University
      ‘The Sensitivity Limits of Nanowire Bio-Sensors’
    • Kehav Dani (Monday Feb. 19, 12:30 condensed matter seminar)
      Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Zhixian Zhou (Tuesday Feb. 20, 4:15 condensed matter seminar)
      Florida State University
    • Douglas Strachan (Thursday Feb. 22, 4:15 colloquium)
      University of Pennsylvania
      ‘Controlled Fabrication and Imaging of Nano-Scale Devices’
    • Oleg Krupin (Monday Feb. 26, 12:30 condensed matter seminar)
      Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & Department of Physics, University of Oregon
      ‘Unraveling Electronic and Spin Structure with Photoemission’
    • Steven Tait (Thursday March 1, 4:15 colloquium)
      Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart
  • Questions that arose during the discussions are:
    • When will the hire be made?
      • Soon after all of the candidates visit, the search committee is expecting to make a job offer.
      • The exact timing of when the new faculty member would join the department would then be somewhat flexible. They may start as early as Fall 2007, or January 2008, depending on the schedule of the person accepting the job.
    • What type of feedback / influence will our opinions have on the prcoess?
      • Kathy Kash said that she is very open to receiving any comments people have after meeting the candidates.
      • Any comments can be emailed directly to her, or forwarded through the PGSA.
      • She said that our comments would then be placed in the candidate’s file. Our comments would be taken into consideration for the hiring in the same way as the comments of any faculty members who are not on the hiring committee (and not seeing the entire applications).
• Planning prospective graduate student visits
  • The prospective graduate student visit will likely occur at the end of March, early April
  • Many people expressed that they liked the format of last year’s visit with a night in Cleveland Heights (Winking Lizard the the Wine Bar) and another downtown (last year dinner at the Metropolitan Cafe).
  • We also talked about making a ‘buddy’ system where each prospective visitor is paired with a current graduate student, hopefully according to research interest.
  • Discussion and planning on the prospective student visit will continue in the next month or two.
• Spring intramural sports & social activities
  • Adam Bradley is interested in organizing a ski trip to Boston Mills / BrandyWine ski hill
  • He was talking about a Friday late night or Sunday evening, perhaps the weekend of February 9th.
  • Anyone interested should email Adam.