Welcome to our new newsletter! We wish to establish better connections with our alumni and other potential friends of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCI; this newsletter is a step in that direction. In recent years there have been a number of changes in the Department: we have a new building and a new classroom building; there has been a healthy turnover in faculty (after seven retirements and a number of new appointments we now have thirty faculty) and staff; in addition to our traditional areas of particle physics, condensed matter physics and plasma physics, we have developed a small but strong program in astronomy (hence the name change!); we have built a new teaching Observatory and an Instructional Computer Laboratory; and we even have a new Home Page on the World Wide Web. At the same time, the Department has continued to maintain its presence at the forefront of research in Physics: our overall research funding is stronger than ever, ranking us in the top two or three departments on campus, and in the top thirty Physics Departments nationwide; most of our younger faculty have won major awards (NSF Young Investigator Awards, Sloan Fellowships, etc.); and we have major new experimental and theoretical research efforts underway in areas as diverse as neutrino astrophysics, growth of diamond films, design of the new Keck Telescope, accelerator-based searches for physics beyond the "Standard Model", and many other areas. This and future Newsletters will inform you of these new developments.In this first newsletter I would like to address what I see as the most significant problem that the Department faces. The present negative trends in the job market for physics graduates, and in federal and industrial financing of research, both basic and applied, are reflected in declining enrollments in physics, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels. These problems are faced by every Physics Department in the US; UCI is no exception. A lively discussion of these problems is underway nationwide: in meetings; trade journals; in various panels of the universities and the American Physical Society; and even in the media. One aspect of the problem is quite clear: that while many (perhaps the majority) of our students, both undergraduate and graduate, find employment outside of basic research in physics, we academic physicists are very poorly coupled to industrial physicists and employers. We need to have a much better understanding of the kind of employment that our students are finding, of the kind of university training that employers find desireable, and of the conditions under which our students compete successfully for jobs both in areas inside and outside of physics (medical instrumentation, computer hardware and software, areas of engineering, financial planning, etc.). Based on anecdotal evidence, we believe that our students are quite successful, and that Physics training is highly regarded, even by non-physics employers; but we need to document this. We need to learn how to give better career counselling to our students, and we need to develop a better database of potential employers for our students. We need to consider changes in our curriculum, on both the graduate and undergraduate level, which will optimize our students chances for employment; for example, whether we should develop a Masters Program.
We are very interested in your response to these and related issues. We need to hear from those of you working in various capacities in industry, in research areas outside of the traditional areas of physics, and also from those of you continuing in basic research in physics who share our concern. We will be contacting as many of you as we can in the near future, with various surveys and questionnaires. (We are making an effort to update the list of addresses of our alumni and friends; and we call on you to help us, both in correcting your own address, and in helping us locate other UCI graduates with whom we have lost contact.) In the meantime, we encourage you to contact us directly with your responses. Feel free to write, call, FAX or e-mail. And come visit!
Jon Lawrence, Chair
Department of Physics and AstronomyUC Irvine
Irvine CA 92717-4575
Phone: 714-824-5580
FAX: 714-824-2174
E-mail: jmlawren@uci.edu