INSIGHT MARQUIS WHO′S WHO SEVENTH EDITION SPRING 2025 How have you navigated disruptions in your industry to remain a top professional? You have to realize you never stop being a student, especially if you’re in advanced research. Yes, you have a PhD, passed all your exams and have your thesis, but if you left the field of physics for 20 years and then came back, you’d have a difficult time. I often remark that for students in advanced undergraduate courses, and particularly graduate courses, almost all the teaching material was known when I was a student. Not all of it, obviously – developments do change things. There's a need to keep active and keep up. What are two key behaviors/personality traits that allow you to be effective in your role? One thing is patience. For many of these complicated concepts, you have to prepare carefully, look at the problem in different ways and show consistent answers. I know some people who are very bright and know a lot of physics, but they have difficulty making complicated concepts straightforward to students. That's the bridge you need. I can think of at least one person who received a Nobel Prize but was not an effective lecturer. What is the most important issue/challenge you are dealing with in your industry? Judging from the standpoint of a physicist, we’re in a situation where we still don’t understand everything completely. We thought there were four different forces in physics and reached a point where we understood at least all of them. However, it seems like there is a material called dark matter, which is an explanation that it doesn't behave the way regular matter does; we don't know how it behaves. It responds to gravitation, and that's why we call it matter. Everything else seems to be capable of interacting with light – the bottom line is that dark matter doesn't respond to light. What innovations or technologies do you feel will shape the future of your industry? People have been able to develop sophisticated instruments. There are ways we can focus more on individual atoms now. Most of the physics studies we've done have involved things larger than atoms. Atoms are the constituents, but chemistry, in particular, is focused on elements and their groups of atoms. There are a few cases in physics where we've been able to manipulate individual atoms with sophisticated electric and magnetic fields. That's a new development in the last 10 to 15 years. It will likely show itself in perhaps several ways in technology in the next 20 or 30 years. The other thing we have done is become more effective in curing cancer. That's still being investigated. Nuclear radiation is similar to chemotherapy in a way. What excites you the most about your industry? What excites me is that physics is an area that changes – you're not just looking at classical literature, which is fixed. We’re in a different time now, so we're not getting more of the literature the Greeks and Romans were producing, for example.
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