News

The City of Kitchener has commissioned from the well known Canadian artist Allan Mackay a large art installation suitable for the redevelopment of Speaker's Corner at the intersection of King and Frederick streets. The central feature of the installation is a large cylindrical-mirror anamorphosis. This optical design of this portion was carried out by Prof. Jim Hunt using the mathematical formalism worked out by Prof. Bernie Nickel. It consists of a stainless steel cylinder 3/4 of a metre in diameter and 1m high.

Congratulations to Professor Joanne O'Meara, who just received a Special Merit Award from the Faculty Association. The award was handed out yesterday, during a lovely reception hosted at the University Club. During her short speech, Joanne thanked Ernie McFarland for preparing the nomination, and the entire Department for nurturing her efforts to improve Physics education. This award is a tremendous source of pride for the Department.

Joanne was selected for the award in recognition of her impressive contributions to University teaching.

Eleven physics undergraduate students attended the 45th Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference, held in Edmonton Alberta from October 1 - 5, 2009. Congratulations to Matt Barrett who received an honourable mention for his presentation on Bacteria, Fluorescence Microscopy, and Protein Oscillations, and Isdin Oke who won first place in the poster session for his poster titled: Preparation, Fabrication and Characterization of Cellulose Nanocrystals.

The following is a list of the students who presented and their poster titles:

Congratulations to M.Sc student Dale Schick-Martin on being awarded a CAM2009 Presenter Scholarship. These scholarships, provided by the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) and Sociedad Mexicana de Física (SMF), were available for up to 30 graduate students pursuing their M.Sc or PhD at a Canadian university. The CAM2009 Presenter Scholarships help cover travel, registration, and airfare costs for CAM2009, the Canada-America-Mexico Graduate Student Physics conference.

Congratulations to this year's poster award winners at the Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute (GWPI) poster session.

The winners from Guelph were:

• Taylor Binnington and Adam Pound (joint poster The physics of relativistic binaries)
• James LeBlanc (Specific heat of underdoped curpates: RVB versus Fermi arcs)
• Isdin Oke (Preparation, deposition, and characterization of cellulose nanocrystals)