乐播传媒 is welcoming a large group of new faculty this year. Seventeen tenured or tenure-track professors will join the college in the course of the 2025-2026 academic year. 乐播传媒 News is introducing them in groups over this semester.聽聽Last week’s installment was the first.

Sarah Conley, assistant professor of physics and astronomy

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

My research is on energy transport in the Sun-Earth system. In particular, I run high-performance computer simulations to study the exchange of energy between particles and electromagnetic fields in what’s called the solar wind: a very low-density, yet constant and dynamic flow of particles that come from the Sun and spread through the solar system.

Big-picture questions in this field include, “Why is the solar corona so much hotter than the surface of the Sun?”, “What causes particles in the solar wind to heat up?”, and “How does space weather 鈥� which is created by energetic events on the Sun like solar flares, or coronal mass ejections 鈥� impact the Earth?” I am excited to explore topics including the Sun, space weather, and space plasma physics in future classes

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year at 乐播传媒?

Getting to know the campus community, and attending concerts and performances at 乐播传媒.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

Watching students become confident in their understanding of topics that are new or challenging, and playing a role in facilitating that process.

Emma Ianni, assistant professor of classical and medieval studies

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

I am a scholar of ancient Greek literature and history. My research focuses on the relationship between tragedy and historiography in classical Athens, with an emphasis on the intersection of gender, democracy, and war. My interests also include reception and public humanities. In both my teaching and research, I explore the (dis)continuities between antiquity and modernity in order to propose inclusive and original engagements with the ancient world.

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year at 乐播传媒?

Seeing how becoming part of the 乐播传媒 community will allow me to take my teaching and scholarship in new, creative, and interdisciplinary directions. I admire the intellectual synergy and spirit of collaboration I’ve seen around me during the past few weeks, and I am excited to be part of such an environment.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

I love seeing students engage with new materials in their own personalized ways  鈥� when they are able to connect the class to their own interests and passions, they bring a contagious enthusiasm to the classroom. I teach ancient Greek and Latin, and I really enjoy facilitating new connections to such old languages; looking at the classical past through my students’ personal investments has helped me to think about it in original, inclusive, and exciting ways.

Cigole Thomas, assistant professor of mathematics

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

My research lies in a field of mathematics called algebraic geometry, where we use algebra to explore and understand geometric shapes. These shapes, known as varieties, are formed by points where a group of equations are all equal to zero simultaneously. I am especially interested in how numbers “move” when an action is applied to mix them. I study the patterns that emerge, called orbits. My research is motivated by the way different branches of mathematics come together, combining their tools to solve questions that would otherwise be difficult to address. 

Another aspect of my work involves exploring ways to improve how mathematics is taught and to better understand how students learn mathematical concepts. I look forward to sharing what I find beautiful in mathematics through teaching. 

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year at 乐播传媒?

Getting to know my students and colleagues and the journeys they have traveled. I look forward to being a small part of their journeys, if only for a while, hopefully to help make their journey at 乐播传媒 a little brighter, a little deeper, and all the more worthwhile.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

What I cherish most in teaching are the quiet transformations, those moments when something learned in class begins to ripple beyond the limits of a single semester. Sometimes you can see it in a moment of understanding, an 鈥渁ha鈥� that lights up a student鈥檚 face 鈥� other times, in a passing remark: 鈥淢ath isn鈥檛 as hard as I thought.鈥� It鈥檚 often these gentle reshapings of a student’s relationship with math that are the most rewarding moments of teaching for me. 

As the sun dipped behind the Chase Hall weather vanes Monday night, the young and the young-at-heart gathered outside Carnegie Science Hall for the 乐播传媒 College Astronomy Extravaganza.

Bright-eyed schoolchildren peered through telescopes towards the stars and listened to students in Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanick’s introductory astronomy course teach and demonstrate the wonders of the cosmos.

Clifford Odle, 8, of Lewiston, points to the title on a "Life Cycle of a Star" poster board, while Eliza Dunham '20, of New Haven, Conn., explains what a supernova is.

Maeve O'Brien '21 of Essex, Conn., explains the life cycle of a star.

Silhouetted in the Ladd Planetarium in Carnegie Science Hall, Aidan Temperino '21 of Plymouth, N.H., and Maggie Phelan '20 of Lewiston, Maine, talk about how the night sky changes with the seasons.

Eliza Dunham '20, of New Haven, Conn., demonstrates what a Type 2 supernova is by popping a balloon filled with glitter.

Yihao Yang '20 of Houston, center, along with Maya Burgos '19 of Lynn, Mass., right, and Viridiana Chavez '20 of Chicago, right, demonstrate the difference between a constellation and an asterism by using toothpicks and gummy bears to build their own constellations.

As part of the event, hosted in collaboration with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships,聽Jamie Fagan ’20 of Wilton, Conn., and Daniel Murphy ’18 of Lexington, Mass., demonstrated air pressure and Newton’s laws using a stomp rocket.

鈥淲e spend a lot of time learning for ourselves, but now it鈥檚 time for us to give back the knowledge we鈥檝e learned, and we鈥檙e really happy and excited to do that,鈥� Fagan said.

鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing more exciting than rocket launches for little kids, so just being able to just spread that excitement to them has been super awesome, we鈥檝e loved it,鈥� added Murphy.

Maeve O’Brien 鈥�21 of Essex, Conn., along with group partners Eliza Dunham 鈥�20, of New Haven, Conn., and Jill Futter 鈥�21 of Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., demonstrated different types of supernovas by popping balloons.

One balloon contained a ping pong ball 鈥� representing a Type 1 supernova, which results in a small white dwarf star. “Nothing really exciting,” Futter said.

But the other balloon contained glitter, which burst out with the force of the pop. “When a Type 2 explodes, it’s very bright and kind of sparkly, which is a lot cooler, in my opinion,” Futter said.

鈥淚 hope kids leave here with a little bit more knowledge about astronomy, and also that they gain an interest in science,鈥� O’Brien said. “I think astronomy is a different subject than what kids learn in school, and events like this can really spark an interest in a different field.”

鈥淗i Peter, my mom (鈥�77) and I dropped by hoping to catch you say hello. We鈥檙e only here for Reunion this weekend & sorry we missed you. We still display ceramics on the beautiful stands that you made for me! Hope that you are well and I hope to see you when I come back for my Reunion in 2019! Have a great summer. 鈥� Kelly Kruger 鈥�14鈥�

Professional machinist Peter Beach discusses an upcoming project with a professor outside his Carnegie Science shop. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/乐播传媒 College)

Kelly Kruger ’14

乐播传媒 professional machinist Peter Beach crafted stands to hold ceramics that Kelly Kruger ’14 created for her senior thesis.

Astronomer Jeffrey Kenney '80 discusses galactic clusters.

Jeffrey Kenney ’80, an astronomy professor at Yale University, visits campus to discuss interactions within galactic clusters at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in Carnegie Science Hall, Room 204, 44 Campus Ave.

The talk, titled The Fate of Galaxies in Clusters, is intended for a mainstream audience and is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

Clusters are the harshest environments for galaxies, and in clusters galaxies undergo many processes that change them. Some are changed by gravitational disturbances including collisions or mergers, whereas others have their star-forming gas stripped out from the stars, leaving “dead” spiral galaxies.

Focusing on disturbances in the Virgo cluster, which consists of 1,300-2,000 galaxies and is the nearest to Earth, Kenney will explain how scientists determine which processes have acted on the galaxies and how they interpret the consequences of these interactions for galactic evolution.

In his research, Kenney explores trends in cluster interactions through targeted studies of individual galaxies, using data from ground- and space-based telescopes, including the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes.

Kenney graduated from 乐播传媒 in 1980 with a degree in physics and earned his doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1987. He joined Yale’s faculty in 1991 and chaired the astronomy department from 2005 to this year.

Interviewed for the story, Clough tells NASA writer Cynthia O’Carroll how he met Petro.

“I was substituting for another faculty member and decided to discuss the geology of the moon,” Clough recalls. “Noah introduced himself as being an enthusiastic fan of space exploration with plans to major in geology. That day we began a conversation about the geology of the moon that never stopped.”

During his time at 乐播传媒, Petro did a summer internship through NASA’s Planetary Geology and Geophysics Undergraduate Research Program and worked with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. He also was also active in the Lewiston-Auburn community, teaching children and adults about the glacial “stories” that can be read from the rock formations on the Androscoggin River’s Great Falls.

Also, view a video of Lundblad talking about his research on the behavior of atoms at near absolute zero that won a competitive $388,000 Department of Defense grant.

Assistant Professor of Physics Nathan Lundblad is the first member of the 乐播传媒 College faculty to receive a Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the grant is for $388,088 over three years. It will fund Lundblad’s research into atomic activity at ultralow temperatures. 乐播传媒 is the only liberal arts school in the nation and the only academic institution in Maine to receive a DEPSCoR grant this year.

It’s well-established that certain materials become extremely efficient electrical conductors — superconductors — when cooled well below freezing. But why particular materials behave this way at such temperatures, potentially suitable for practical application, isn’t clear. Lundblad hopes to better understand this phenomenon by taking it to the extreme: He will study the subatomic behavior of matter when cooled to about 100 billionths of a degree above the temperature, roughly 460 degrees below zero, where atomic motion ceases — absolute zero.

Text continues below the video

“It’s an experimental area where the laws of quantum mechanics, the natural laws that govern the behavior of particles on extremely small scales, become dominant,” he says. “These laws can be very weird and counterintuitive.”

Lundblad plans to observe a sample of ultracold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate. At such low temperatures, the locations of the gas atoms become fundamentally indistinguishable. With the gas confined in a vacuum chamber, he will use laser beams to create “optical lattice traps” that simulate the complicated behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors.

But the simulation will be “cleaner,” or subject to fewer variables, than its crystalline high-temperature counterparts. The hope is that the gas particles’ behavior at near absolute zero will shed light on particle behavior in crystalline high-temperature situations.

While any applications of the research won’t come for quite a long time, the work could support important technological advances. “An electrical grid made of a high-temperature superconductor, for example, could be immensely cheaper than our current system,” he says. Timekeeping and other measurement systems could also benefit.

Any military applications, Lundblad adds, would be nonspecific and on a long time scale. “I like to think of ultracold atoms as a field similar to the laser in the 1960s — a hotbed of research, but nobody knew quite what to do with them yet.”

The Department of Defense takes the long view, he explains. “Similar to its funding of research related to creating the Internet, they figure that spending research dollars advances the cause of the country in general, and if they reap some technological benefit 30 years down the line, so be it.”

Astronomer R. Bruce Partridge visits 乐播传媒 College to give a lecture titled Photographing the Big Bang at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 10, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Avenue.

The lecture is open to the public at no cost. Partridge is presented by the Department of Physics and Astronomy in a visit supported by the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships Endowment Fund and the American Astronomical Society. For more information, please call 207-786-6325.

Partridge is the Bettye and Howard Marshall Professor of Natural Sciences at Haverford College, Haverford, Pa. His research focuses on cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy formation, radio astronomy and cosmology. He is the author of some 150 articles and the book 3K: The Cosmic Microwave Background (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and contributed to the book Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium (National Academy Press, 2001).

At Haverford, Partridge teaches physics and astronomy courses at the advanced and survey levels, reflecting a strong interest in teaching technical subjects to non-specialists.

Originally from Hawaii, Partridge received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his doctorate from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received Fulbright Scholarships to study in Uruguay and Norway in the 1970s and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988 and 1989.

Partridge was an instructor at Oxford and Princeton before going to Haverford as an assistant professor in 1970. He has since also served as dean of the college and provost there. He received the Christian and Mary Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and was named Marshall Professor of the Natural Sciences in 1982.

Partridge gives his lecture during a four-day visit to 乐播传媒.

The Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships in Astronomy, sponsored by the American Astronomical Society, celebrate the achievements of Harlow Shapley, whose research disproved the theory that our sun has a central position in the Milky Way. Shapley was a renowned public lecturer and educator, and a lifelong member of the American Astronomical Society.

The lecture is open to the public at no cost. Partridge is presented by the Department of Physics and Astronomy in a visit supported by the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships Endowment Fund and the American Astronomical Society. For more information, please call 207-786-6325.

Partridge is the Bettye and Howard Marshall Professor of Natural Sciences at Haverford College, Haverford, Pa. His research focuses on cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy formation, radio astronomy and cosmology. He is the author of some 150 articles and the book 3K: The Cosmic Microwave Background (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and contributed to the book Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium (National Academy Press, 2001).

At Haverford, Partridge teaches physics and astronomy courses at the advanced and survey levels, reflecting a strong interest in teaching technical subjects to non-specialists.

Originally from Hawaii, Partridge received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his doctorate from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received Fulbright Scholarships to study in Uruguay and Norway in the 1970s and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1988 and 1989.

Partridge was an instructor at Oxford and Princeton before going to Haverford as an assistant professor in 1970. He has since also served as dean of the college and provost there. He received the Christian and Mary Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and was named Marshall Professor of the Natural Sciences in 1982.

Partridge gives his lecture during a four-day visit to 乐播传媒.

The Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships in Astronomy, sponsored by the American Astronomical Society, celebrate the achievements of Harlow Shapley, whose research disproved the theory that our sun has a central position in the Milky Way. Shapley was a renowned public lecturer and educator, and a lifelong member of the American Astronomical Society.

“It’s thrilling to shout across the room ‘I’ve got one!’ when you spot the first supernova during an observing run,” said Soderberg, a math-physics major who was on leave from 乐播传媒 to participate in the NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program.

As part of a team of astrophysicists working in Hawaii and at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, Soderberg used the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope and the Keck Observatory, both on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to make the discovery.

Identifying supernovae is a process of elimination. The CFH Telescope takes two digital pictures of the sky three weeks apart. Soderberg compared the two pictures to identify “residuals,” light objects that changed brightness. Based on her knowledge of luminous astronomical objects, Soderberg then distinguished the residuals from other objects in view, such as variable stars, asteroids and active galactic nuclei. She and her team then confirmed her supernovae identifications with the low-resolution spectrograph on the Keck Telescope.

Since research time at large observatories is strictly scheduled, Soderberg’s recommendations on what to look for with the Keck Telescope were key to the discovery. “With research time at the Keck Observatory so limited, you want to make sure that you don’t waste four hours looking for dust,” she said.

The team launched its search for supernovae — bright, dying stars located billions of light years from Earth — in the hope that measuring the light from these stars can help determine whether the expansion of the universe is accelerating or decelerating. Preliminary results imply that the universe is accelerating, not slowing down.

Considering all that could have gone wrong, Soderberg says she felt “tremendous relief” at the discovery of so many supernovae. Bad weather and software glitches routinely upset the best-laid research plans. Working on the project via the Internet with colleagues collecting data across time zones meant “stress, little sleep and lots of junk food,” Soderberg said.

“Discovering supernovae requires one to remain organized and focused for several 20-hour workdays in a row, something Alicia can do as well as any of the team’s scientists,” said Brian Schmidt, astronomer at Australia’s Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring observatories and lead investigator of the supernova discovery team. “Very few students are given opportunities like this. Alicia has made the most of them by proving herself a hard worker, finding her own funding and asking the right questions of the right people.”

With encouragement from Eric Wollman, professor of physics at 乐播传媒, Soderberg received her first NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates grant to study at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics after her sophomore year at 乐播传媒, in summer 1997.

Soderberg stayed at Harvard during the first semester of her junior year, studying astrophysics and becoming a resident expert on the computer software used to help identify supernovae. She spent the second semester of her junior year at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile developing a short list of possible supernovae to find with the low-resolution spectrograph at the Keck Observatory.

Soderberg’s research will culminate in a 乐播传媒 honors thesis, but she doesn’t get starry eyed about just supernovae. She also has studied binary stars in globular clusters from Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory and looked for the existence of water in central-belt asteroids from Cornell University’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Before returning to 乐播传媒 for the second semester of her senior year, she received another grant — this one from the U.S. Department of Energy — to study gamma ray bursts at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Soderberg, a graduate of Falmouth High School, is the daughter of Jon and Nancy Soderberg, 726 Old Barnstable Road, Mashpee.