It has been a while since our last newsletter, and it is nice to have an opportunity to reconnect with the UC Santa Barbara physics community and share recent developments.
A significant development has been the enormous growth in our undergraduate student body; last year, UCSB graduated more physics majors (141) than any other US institution. With that increased enrollment, we have updated our curriculum to include multiple tracks for the core courses and expanded lab courses. We’ve added new lower division labs, including an introduction to programming and a series of sophomore labs that include an independent measurement project. We have also added an upper-division scientific computing lab and are developing an optics lab. The updated curriculum also offers new concentrations in astrophysics, physics education, and biophysics to provide broad career opportunities for our graduates.
While the number of graduate student applications has also grown, now well over 1,000 per year, our graduate student cohort remains rather constant; we welcomed 23 excellent grad students this year and 30 last year. The number of faculty has grown by about 10%, now at 55, with several new appointments and retirements.
With the increase in student enrollment and new instructional labs, Broida Hall is more than full. We have recently launched a project for a Physics Instructional Lab Complex that we plan to locate between the Library and Broida Hall. With 6,000 sq-ft of space, it would house the labs for both physics majors and non-physics majors and have room for offices for the Instructional Lab Group and the maker space that students use for 3D printing and electronics assembly for lab and research projects. This move will allow more space in Broida for our research efforts, which have also grown significantly. Two interesting metrics are that the extramural grant funding in physics is now the largest of any department on campus, and the department continues to rank in the top ten physics programs nationally.
An important focus for us now is maintaining opportunities for our growing number of undergraduates to participate in the department’s research. Research experience and other project-based learning are great ways for our students to broaden their technical and critical thinking skills, build confidence in real-world problem solving, and develop pragmatism, which are all a foundation for broad career opportunities. We are thrilled to see a growing number of students successfully engaging in research, which is made possible by generous support from donors, mentoring by both faculty and graduate students, and the students’ grit and enthusiasm.
I’d like to close with a note about the importance of rebuilding connections after the pandemic. We all struggled during the pandemic with "remote everything." Since then, we have focused on bringing back the interactions that are critical for both scientific discourse and our sense of community. This includes small traditions like coffee and cookies before colloquium, the annual Goleta beach party (this year’s grad-faculty volleyball game was won by the grad students), and the chance to just run into each other and ask, “What’s up?”. We intend this newsletter to update you on what’s happening in the department, and we hope to hear back about what’s up with you!
David Stuart
Professor of Physics and department chair
