ConvergeDiverge

(view from our cabin at Honeyrock)

We’re two days into the Fall 2011 semester, but here’s a wrap-up of how my summer went:

• Two days after graduation, we hit the ground running with summer research. I worked with two Wheaton students on two different projects, one on NMR and another, in collaboration with an applied health sciences professor, on ultrasound. We all spent ten weeks together and I believe made some good progress on getting the undergraduate version of my research up and running. My NMR research was a little hampered in that there was a delay in getting our new machine delivered, but it’s slated to be here in September. Through the generosity of a researcher at NIU, we were able to run some rudimentary experiments that confirmed that we’ll need to deal with radiation damping in our experiments. I look forward to tackling that. It plagued me a bit in grad school and I’m ready to figure out how to avoid it in my experiments. We also made some estimates on what sizes of polymers might be present in the polymer gel dosimeters at different doses, something that has not yet been able to be identified by experiment since it is very difficult to extra the polymer from the gels after they have been irradiated.  On the ultrasound side of things, we’ve been developing some software for making a certain kind of measurement and spent the summer making phantoms and testing the software. We’ll move on to human studies hopefully soon.
• We took all the physics department summer resarch students to see the plasma labs and medical physics department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have some fabulous facilities up there and we all enjoyed getting the insider’s view by one of my colleagues, who did his PhD there as wellas some years as a researcher. We also stopped at the world’s largest Culver’s on the way home. Later in the summer, I toured Fermilab for the first time.
• I attended four conferences: THATCamp LAC at St. Norbert College, Gordon Research Conference on Magnetic Resonance at the University of New England, the conference for the American Scientific Affiliation at nearby North Central College, and the summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers at Creighton University. It was great to meet some people I know from Twitter and through ProfHacker, as well as reconnect with others I’ve met previously.
• I finished up the summer by teaching in my college’s orientation program, Passage, at Honeyrock in Three Lakes, Wisconsin. We faculty had a mighty fierce go-karting session one evening.