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Graduate Students - First Year 

Teaching Award-Dr. Roxanne Springer 
 
Dr. N. Russell Roberson retires 
 
New Faculty-Dr. Shailesh Chandrasekharan 
 
New Focus in Teaching Labs 
 
Math and Physics Library Renovations 
 
FEL Construction 
 
Visiting Lecturer - Dr. Carlos Frenk 
 
Dr. Larry Evans retires as Chairman 
 
Dr. Daniel Gauthier receives tenure 

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Sonya Bahar is one of approximately twenty Research Associates in the Physics Department.  This year, she applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the American Heart Association and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology. We have our fingers crossed that Sonya will receive one of these prestigious awards.  Please read below to learn more about the research she is working on.  In the next issue, we will feature more articles from Research Associates who would like to share with you what they are working on.

 

"Cardiac fibrillation is a major cause of death in the United States.  During fibrillation, disorganized waves of electrochemical excitation meander across the heart, preventing from contracting in a coordinated fashion to pump blood through the body.  Typical emergency room methods of defribrillating the heart involve delivering a large jolt of electricity across the chest in order to briefly stop the heart and reset it to a normal rhythm.  But this is painful to the patient, and so the physics community has been trying to extrapolate techniques from nonlinear dynamices (chaos) and control theory to develop ways of stopping fibrillation with small, carefully timed electrical pulses."

"In collaboration with Associate Professor Dan Gauthier and graduate student Martin Hall, I have been studying complex chaotic electrochemical excitations in frog cardiac muscle. These studies have allowed us to test "chaos control protocols" designed to stabilize unhealthy chaotic behavior.  We are now collaborating with faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department (Pat Wolf and Wanda Krassowska) to study similar control techniques in sheep hearts. We want to determine whether control protocols which work in small pieces of heart muscle can actually be applied to stabilizing the spatial disorder of atrial fibrillation in living animals.  The most exciting thing about this research is that it allows us to work at the interface between physics and biology, applying nonlinear dynamics theory to problems in cardiology."