Alumni News


1950's

JACK AVRIN
M.S. Physics `51, has been living in Rancho Palos Verdes with his wife since 1972. They have two sons, one of whom is a physicist, the other a professor of mathematics. After working as a defense/aerospace engineer for forty years, he retired and is now interested in fundamental physics. He developed what he calls a Geometrical Model of the elementary particles that correlates well with the fundamentals of the well-known Standard Model but goes well beyond the latter's ability to explain many of its basic features. Jack has spent the last few years trying to interest the particle physics community in his work but with a singular lack of success due at least in part, to the departure of the model's basic notions from mainstream thinking. He presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society at Ohio State University last August. A summary of the paper is expected to be published by World Scientific publishers as a supplement of the International Journal of Modern Physics.

A. WAYNE HARRISON
B.A. Astronomy `59, along with his wife have resided in Leawood, Kansas for the past forty years. Their three children have now produced ten grandchildren including a set of triplets who will celebrate their fourth birthday soon. Wayne and his wife, Anita celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary this year.

ROSHAN L. SHARMA
M.S. Physics `55, has completed sixteen years of consulting in the field of networking and eight years of teaching at SMU in Dallas after retiring early from Rockwell International in 1984. He remains active in both fields.

HERBERT J. WINTROUB
B.A. Physics `50, holds the position of Distinguished Engineer, Engineering and Technology Group at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.

1960's

BRUCE COOK
B.S. Physics `68, M.A. Film Education `73, Ph.D. Communications `76, after he spent five years in aerospace, Bruce moved into cinema. He's directed 7 feature films, produced 11, edited 20, done the trailers for 18, created sound and mixes for 20, written 30 screenplays and has had 9 produced.Also has done international consulting to help make foreign films competitive in the global market.
Has taught part-time since 1973 at USC for five years, 26 years at L.A. City College and over a dozen other colleges in the Southern California area. This summer, he'll be teaching at UCLA.

G. ROGER GATHERS
B.S. Physics `60, went on to graduate school at UC Berkeley as the first physics graduate from USC (or so they told him). Graduate school was extended because he had to do 2 experimental thesis projects (the first proved to be technically beyond the state of the art and still is). As a result, he received the Ph.D. in Physics from Berkeley in 1967, with his thesis topic Cyclotron Resonance in Lead.
He spent his career at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Initially he worked in the weapons testing program. He went on to become a group leader and wrote a classified report on how to test nuclear weapons as well as an unclassified excerpt that could be taken into the field. That report became the standard training manual for new diagnostic physicists from LLNL.
Roger pioneered a high temperature properties of materials measurement technique called the Isobaric Expansion Experiment. In some cases it produced data in a region of conditions where no other source was available. He became somewhat of a specialist on pyrometry for awhile.
He then moved into shock wave experimental work, measuring the Hugoniot of materials. He published results for a number of materials, one of them platinum which served as a standard because of its high shock impedance. He then modified a computer code called GASGUN to model three stages and a cryogenic gas fill. He published a graduate level text on shock wave physics and equation of state modeling. He also worked on SDI projects for assessing the ability to destroy incoming warheads on ICBMs and `black' projects for the weapons divisions.
Finally, he moved into doing nuclear criticality analysis. He retired from LLNL in 1993, however was invited to come back since a replacement could not be found. He worked five more years, then moved into the commercial sector where he worked for M.H. Chew & Associates in Livermore doing the same type of work. His title is Senior Scientist.
Roger married Christine E. Key in 1969 and they have one son, Kevin who works in computer graphics, animation, etc. Roger has an Extra Class ham radio license with the call N6GRF (Christine's is N6RBI). He is an amateur astronomer and both he and his wife enjoy camping.

MURLAND W. SEARIGHT
B.A. Astronomy `60, forty-two years ago, he received USC's very first degree in Astronomy, courtesy of the United States Navy. Although he never actually pursued astronomy professionally, he stayed in touch with two inspirational teachers, Professor John Russell and Gibson Reaves. He owes them much.

GEORGE STROBEL
Ph.D. Physics `65, is a physics professor at the University of Georgia. He is working on removal of center of mass energy from 2 and 3 body systems of relativistic nearly massless quarks confined via a scalar linear potential. He also works at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the summer, so he can pay high gasoline taxes, and enjoy a rolling blackout, neither of which can he experience back in Athens, Georgia.

1970's

JACKIE ALAN GIULIANO
B.S. Astronomy `77, attended USC during the time when the Astronomy Department was run by Gibson Reaves and John Russell. Those were golden times with only 10 - 12 majors who were able to be TA's, give planetarium shows, and use the 30-inch reflector at Stony Ridge Observatory near Mount Wilson. Upon graduation, he was employed by NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. For the next 20 years, he worked as a mission planner on missions such as Voyager, Galileo, the Space Station and Project Topex. During his time at JPL, his interest in the Earth was rekindled and he went back to school and received his M.S. in Environmental Studies form Cal State, Dominguez Hills. In 1998, he received his Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the Union Institute School of Graduate Studies.After leaving JPL in 1992, he began his teaching career. He now lives in Seattle, Washington where he teaches classes in Environmental Science and Astronomy at local colleges. For the last four years, he has written a weekly commentary for the Environment News Service, hosted on the Lycos Search Engine and Internet Guide (www.ens.lycos.com) on environmental issues of the day. He maintains a website devoted to his environmental and educational work at www.deepteaching.com. A complete archive of his weekly writings can be found at www.healingourworld.com.

MARTIN GUNDERSEN
M.A. Physics `68, Ph.D. Physics `73, received the 2000 Germeshausen Award of the International Power Modulator Symposium For contributions to power modulator and radar transmitter technologies at the June meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. The award is named after Kenneth Germeshausen of EG & G (he is the first G, and also the first recipient of the award) and is the major award for the meeting. The award is sponsored by the DoD Advisory Group on Electron Devices, Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, Sandia National Laboratories, and the IEEE Electron Device Society. The Power Modulator Symposium is a forum for research and development for repetitive pulsed power for laser, radar, accelerator and other applications, and is held every second year.
Additionally, Martin, professor and chair of electrical engineering/electrophysics and professor of physics at USC, received a substantial research grant through the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program.

DONALD HAVENS
B.S. Physics `69, M.A. Physics `72, has worked for Rockwell Collins as an acoustic engineer since graduating from USC. Don and his wife Kay, live in Irvine, California with their two children.

W. STEVE QUON
B.S. Physics, `68, M.A. Physics, `70, Ph.D. Physics `74, after completing graduate work in physics under S.P.S. Porto, Steve spent the next 7 years in Research and Development in the then nascent industry of flat panel displays, particularly in the development of liquid crystal displays and electro-activated particle displays, for North American Phillips Laboratories and Beckman Instruments. For the next ten years he was a senior scientist and optical system engineer for TRW, Inc. specializing in high-energy lasers for Strategic Defense Initiative programs during the Reagan administration. This culminated in 1988 with the first lasing of a megawatt-class cw hydrogen fluoride laser. He also worked on phase conjugation system engineering to clean up beam distortions. As an independent consultant, Steve worked for Mission Research Corporation where he performed experiments to develop optical sensing using an enhanced Zeeman-effect using cesium. For the last 10 years, he has been Professor of Physics at Ventura College. Steve is currently authoring a Web-based electronic companion book to R. Serway's College Physics published by Saunders.

PHILLIP G. WISE
B.S. Physics `76, M.D. School of Medicine `82, is the Vice Chairman of the Commission on Legislation for the California Medical Association. He is also the President-elect of the California Urological Association as well as Councilman for District 1 of the San Diego County Medical Society. He has a private practice of urology in La Jolla and San Diego, specializing in male infertility, prostate and bladder cancer.

1980's

TERRY BURTON
B.S Physical Sciences `85, is currently in the graduate school program of engineering at the University of California Berkeley. His emphasis is environmental engineering, from the chemical and nuclear engineering perspective. After finishing at USC, Terry began working on the Boeing 747 aircraft as a technical writer. After two years, he moved over to the B-2 bomber project at Northrop, where he remained until 1990. He left Northrop for a management position at Chrysler Technologies (now part of Raytheon) until deciding to return to graduate school full-time. He earned his M.S. from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1999, and began the Ph.D. program at Berkeley that same year. As lead or co-writer, he has more than 25 technical publications in the fields of aerospace and environmental engineering. Terry is married to the former Alev Taskapilioglu, and has a daughter, Jasmin. He continues to try to warrant the confidence Dr. Forster showed in him as an undergraduate.

ROBERT DE LEONARDIS
M.A. Physics `76, Ph.D. Physics `80, is an engineering specialist in the Guidance Analysis Department at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California. He works in the booster area; primary topics include vehicle dynamics and the guidance algorithms in the onboard software.

DIMITRIOS A. DERVOS
M.A. Physics `82, M.S. Computer Engineering `82, received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. Dimitrios works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Technology at the Technology Educational Institute in Greece.

MARK W. SINCELL
B.S. Physics `86, is currently a contributing editor at Science Magazine, and a freelance science writer with recent articles in Discover, Popular Science, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Physics World and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

SHIN-TSON WU
Ph.D. Physics `81, was elected to receive the extremely prestigious 2001 Society for Information Display (SID) Fellow award. Each year, SID honors four Fellows worldwide. Based on the global display activities, Asia usually receives two seats, Europe and North American one seat each. This year the North American representative is Dr. Wu.
His second book entitled Reflective Liquid Crystal Displays coauthored by Professor D.K. Yang of Kent State University, will be published by John Wiley (London) in April, 2001.
This summer, Dr. Wu will become a provost research enhancement professor at the School of Optics at the University of Central Florida. Presently, the School of Optics has about 30 faculty members and is expanding rapidly. He plans to hire several post doctors in optical communications, new liquid crystal materials, and flat panel displays.

1990's

MOON-GU BAIK
Ph.D. Physics `96, is the Department Chair in the Department of Physics at Kyungwon University in the Republic of Korea.

DAVID COHEN
M.S. Physics `94, Ph.D. Electrical Engineering `01, received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at USC this year. David is now working at Rifocs Corporation in Camarillo, California, as a Fiber Optic Scientist.

AMY FREDERICKS
B.S. Astronomy `96, is a data analyst at MIT for the HETG instrument on the Chandra X-ray Telescope.

JEREMY SCHEIDT
B.S. Physics `96, is working in software development in the Cincinnati, Ohio area.

ALEXANDER SMALL
B.S. Physics `98, is now at University of California Santa Barbara and prays that his next data will be good enough to advance to candidacy. He is engaged to Adrienne Kelly, an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles. He also won $850 on Win Ben Stein's Money and had a fun day doing it.

ALEX WEI WEI
M.A. Physics `86, Ph.D. Physics `90, lives in the suburbs of Indianapolis with his wife and two sons (5 and 9 years old). He works for Conseco Capital Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of Conseco Inc., a financial services company in insurance, investment and consumer finance. He is Vice President and Head of Mortgage Investment. Alex has been there for five years.

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