Unique to Houston: Health Physics at TSU      09/20/2009

The health physics degree program at Texas Southern University is the first program of its kind in Houston, Texas. It prepares students to work in both the medical field and in any industry utilizing nuclear radiation energy. Graduates are trained to oversee and monitor safe working and living environments affected by nuclear radiation sources whether in hospitals, nuclear power plants, government or private research facilities. With a B.S. in Health Physics from TSU, students may command a six-figure salary in a rapidly expanding field dealing with nuclear energy safety. The program is directed by Dr. C. R. Handy, while Dr. Elena Stefanova, an assistant professor in experimental nuclear physics, serves as the scientific coordinator. It was established through various federal grants from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission totaling close to $570,000. An additional $180,000 in scholarships was received through a University of Texas-Austin led consortium sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The Health Physics program’s first students will graduate in May 2010, including a student in the 18-24-month post-baccalaureate program, which allows students with existing B.S. degrees in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics to update their degree with specialized training in this highly marketable area, resulting in a second B.S. degree. Certificate programs will also be offered in the near future.

For More Information

Letter from Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee      07/19/2009

Martin Gutzwiller to Visit Texas Southern University Physics Department      04/20/2009

Martin C. Gutzwiller (born in Basel, Switzerland, October 12, 1925) obtained a diploma in physics with Wolfgang Pauli in 1950 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and a PhD with Max Dresden in 1953 from Kansas State University. After that he worked in geophysics for the Shell Oil Company, then moved to IBM Research until his retirement in 1993. He was also an adjunct professor in various universities including Columbia University, ETH in Zurich, University Paris-Sud in Orsay, Polytechnic Institute in Stockholm, and finally Yale University. Dr. Gutzwiller is known for the invention of Gutzwiller wave function which is composed of a simple many-electron wave function acted on by a correlation operator (Gutzwiller projection) describing electrons with strong localized interactions (Gutzwiller approximation). He is also known for performing the first investigation of the relationship between classical and quantum mechanics in chaotic systems, as well as novel solutions to mathematical problems in field theory, wave propagation, crystal physics, and quantum and celestial mechanics. Throughout his career he has published over 60 scientific papers, and wrote classic monograph Chaos in Classical and Quantum Mechanics. He was elected to the US National Academy in 1992 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993; he was given the Dannie Heinemann Prize for Mathematical Physics by the American Physical Society in 1993, and the Max Planck medal by the German Physical Society in 2003. He was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the Forum for the History of Physics of the American Physical Society. In appreciation of his seminal contributions to theoretical physics, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS) annually awards the Martin-Gutzwiller-Fellowship to acknowledge and promote exceptional research in this field. For more information, visit http://www.mpipks-dresden.mpg.de/~mcgutz/index.html.

Dr. Gutzwiller will be giving three seminars on Quantum Chaos and related topics this week at Texas Southern Univeristy

New Track in Post Baccalaureate Health Physics      03/23/2009

The Physics Department is launching a new Post Baccalaureate Program in Health Physics for the Greater Houston area for the Spring and Fall of 2009. It is funded by Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). To register for a full scholarship, please fill out the online registration form.

For other question, please, call the Physics Department at

713-313-1850 or 713-313-7980

or email Dr. Carlos Handy

Physics Department Purchases New SuperComputer      01/27/2009

The Physics Department of Texas Southern University has purchased a new parallel supercomputer. The cluster is composed of five Dell 1950, dual board quad core, 2.0 Ghz, 8 GB of memory,  as compute nodes. A Dell 2950, dual board quad core, 2.0 Ghz, 8 GB memory, 1.5 TB disk, as the head node (total of 48 cores). The top combined processing speed of this system will be 250+ GFlops, roughly 50 time faster then a typical desktop. This machine will be used for research in quantum chemistry, nanotechnology simulation, biostatistics and computational biology, mathematics, computational finance and drug design and discovery. This resource will be made available to all Texas Southern University researcher.

For more Infomation, go to: ares.tsu.edu or the Texas Southern University High Performance Computing Center (TSU-HPCC)

The Physics Dept. is launching the only Health Physics Program in Houston.      06/02/2008

The Physics Department at TSU is launching an honors-level Health Physics program for Fall 2008. Funded through a grant from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it will be the only Health Physics program in the Greater Houston area. This Physics Based program will grant a Professional BS degree in Health Physics with an emphasis in Environmental Health Physics. Pre-Medical Physics (in collaboration with M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Houston) and Nuclear Engineering (in collaboration with UT Austin) will be available. For details, see Health Physics .

Two new visiting Professors and one new instructor hired at TSU Physics Department      01/26/2008

Internet2 connection between TSU and UH to be installed.      08/17/2007

Physics professor receives Nuclear Regulatory Commission grant in Nuclear Health/Radiation Physics      07/15/2007

Physics professor receives a research Welch Grant at TSU      04/03/2007

Dr. C. J. Tymczak, an Associate Professor in the Texas Southern University Department of Physics, has received one of the first Welch Foundations research Grant. . This is a very prestigious and highly competitive grant, and he is the first to receive it in the history of Texas Southern University. Dr. Tymczak received this grant for proposing fundamental research in computational quantum chemistry, a very important emerging field in science and technology, which he has been developing with his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The title of the grant is "Many-Body Density Matrix Perturbation Theory", and will be for three years at a rate of $50,000 a year.

A new SGI Origin2000 parallel supercomputer is acquired by the TSU physics department from University of Illinois Chemistry Department      02/14/2007

A Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 parallel supercomputer has been aquired by to the Texas Southern department of physics from department of chemistry of the University of Illinois. This parallel supercomputer is one of the first ever shared memery computer clusters ever conceived. It has a total of 128 nodes, each node consisting of the MIPS R12000 400 MHz proces

sor. The total amount of shared memory is 64 MBytes.

The TSU Physics department is in the process of configuring the this system to be used for parallel computations of computational physics problems.

Two new Visiting Professors hired at TSU Physics Department      01/01/2007

The Texas Southern Department of Physics announced the hiring of two new visiting physics professors, Dr. Elena Stefanova and Dr. Y. Lee

Dr. Elena Stefanova is a nuclear physicist from Bulgaria. She recieved here Ph.D from Rugars.

Dr. Y. Lee research field is theoretical physics, with particular interest in quantum fields and computational aspect of in statistical mechanics (condensed matter physics). Dr. Lee's major current interests are concentrated on the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, string theory, and black hole theory.Dr. Lee is using the minimum uncertainty (μ) wavelet model and harmonic oscillator model as tools to explore them. Using the minimum uncertainty wavelet model (which is a constrained minimization solution of Heisenberg uncertainty) Dr. lee is exploring the SUSY quantum mechanics, coherent state theory and string theory. Initially, my aim is to compare μ wavelets to more traditional quantum field theoretic approaches. Dr. Lee recived BS and MS degree from the University of Yonsei, South Korea Seoul in 1975 and 1981 on the study of 2+1 dimensional Yang- Mill theory. Dr. Lee then recieved his Ph.D. degree frm the Univsersity of Houston, Houston Texas on the study of minoum uncertainty wavelets in SUSY Quantum Mechanics.

Two new Professors hired at TSU Physics Department      09/01/2006

The Texas Southern Department of Physics announced the hiring of two new physics professors, Dr. Daniel Bessis and Dr. C. J. Tymczak

Daniel Bessis is one of the most distinguished mathematical physicists in the world today. He has had an immense impact on many of the sub fields of mathematical physics and has been a major player in this area of physics for nearly half a century. Dr. Bessis has produced many outstanding students, among these Jean Zinn-Justin, who is one of the leading mathematical physicists in France. Michael Barnsley, a major player in the field of fractal mathematics, was his post doc for two years in Saclay. Giorgio Paris, winner of the prestigious Dannie Heineman prize in mathematical physics was inspired by earlier works by Bessis. Bessis has contributed to such diverse areas of mathematical physics as Pade theory, wavelets, signal processing, analytic function theory, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He worked with Handy on techniques for determining eigenvalues by using moment methods and provided inspiration for an active area of research that I am involved in now that is known as PT symmetry. Bessis was the Scientific Director of the Mathematical Physics section at the Theory Division of the French Atomic Agency in Saclay, France. This institution included many of the top European scientists with whom he maintains active research collaborations. Right now Bessis is interested in the deep problem of medical imaging. He has discovered what is likely to be an enormous breakthrough in this field. He proposes to use non commutative matrix Pade approximations to perform fast, efficient, and accurate imaging. I believe that these new ideas have an excellent chance of revolutionizing this extremely important field.

Dr. C. J. Tymczak has specialized in the identification, development, and implementation of new scientific codes for exploiting advanced computing resources impacting large scale computation in diverse areas in Many-body physics, Quantum Chemistry and ab initio Molecular Dynamics. He is an Associate Professor of Physics at Texas Southern University, Houston, where he is spearheading the integration of supercomputing resources into various STEM programs. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Doctor Tymczak is a permanent scientific associate within the MondoSCF initiative, involving the development of a massively parallel linear scaling quantum chemistry methods, currently under development in collaboration with Dr. Matt Challacombe (T-12). He is one of the first to exploit wavelet based methods in large scale computing for understanding the electronic structure of materials. For the last four years, he has advanced the MondoSCF development through the exploitation of advanced data structures and advanced machine architectures. MondoSCF is now recognized as one of the first quantum chemical codes with demonstrable scalable parallelism within large-scale parallel clusters. This enables the ab initio prediction of important material properties relevant to national defense and homeland security. Dr. Tymczak received his Bachelors of Science degree in Physics from the Pennsylvania state university in 1987, his Masters of Science degree in Physics from Clemson University in 1989 and his Doctorate degree in theoretical physics from Texas A&M in 1995.