Faculty and Staff
"Uncommon Knowledge" Radio Spots
The ISU Physics Department has a weekly radio show hosted by Janet Moore & Jay Ansher.
- Disappearing American Languages (mp3)
- Red Skies (mp3)
- CFLs and Mercury Pollution (mp3)
- Talking to Animals (mp3)
Faculty: Learn more about our faculty and emeritus faculty.
Staff: Click here for a listing of administrative staff, support staff, and post-doc researchers.
Resources: Looking for travel reimbursement, college forms, or other links? Click here for links to Resources for Faculty & Staff
Points of Pride
Faculty regularly obtain grants from major national agencies such as NSF, NASA, and DOE that support our undergraduate researchers with paid stipends.
C. Robert O'Dell '59, Physics, L.L.D. '01, was a lead scientist in the development of the Hubble space telescope. He served as project scientist for the first 10 years of the telescope's development at NASA. His observations using the Hubble focused on a study of the great nebula Orion, leading to confirmation that all stars have planets or the potential for planetary systems. O'Dell is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at Vanderbilt Univeristy in Nashville, Tennessee.
Three department faculty are Fellows of the American Physical Society: Dr. Shang-Fen Ren, Dr. Rainer Grobe, and Dr. Richard Martin. APS Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one's professional peers.
Points of Pride
The department's Physics Teacher Education program has received national attention in an American Association of Physics Teachers white paper entitled "The Preparation of Excellent Teachers at All Levels", which states that the ISU program is considered one of the most innovative and the largest in the nation. The department pioneered the "teacher education pipeline" project and is a member of the Physics Teacher Education Coalition.
The department developed one of the first undergraduate programs in computational physics, its Computer Physics degree sequence. The program has received two national awards from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Physics students enjoy lunch at a departmental get-together.
Points of Pride
Prof. Shang-Fen Ren has run summer research programs for undergraduates in China, in which students spent 2 months working with condensed matter and nanoscience researchers at Beijing University. The program attracted students not only from Illinois State, but from around the country. This photo shows an ISU student working with a Chinese graduate student.
Rainer Grobe and Charles Su co-direct the Intense Laser Physics Theory Unit. They have received a total of more than one million dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and The Research Corporation. Their work, including the discovery of cycloatoms and a solution to the Klein paradox, is featured internationally in elite scientific journals. Their work has placed them as two of the world's premier theoretical atomic and optical physicists. In addition, the U.S. Patent Office awarded a patent to Grobe for his innovations in the transmission of optical signals through an absorbing medium.