News Items
Editor's Note
Some of these news items may not be very fresh but since the Newsletter is starting up after some time we believe it would be appropriate to mention several items that should have been mentioned had our Newsletters been issued as usual. So, please bear with me.
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**Professor Jayanth R. Banavar, Head of the Department of Physics, The Pennsylvania State University is now a Distinguished Professor of Physics at The Pennsylvania State University
For more details see
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Banavar3-2003.htm
**Professor V.M (Nitant) Kenkre, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico and the Director of the Consortium of the Americas has been named a Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico.
For more details see
http://www.unm.edu/~artsci/about/news.html
**Former ACIPA President, Professor Alok Kumar, Professor of Physics at SUNY at Oswego is presently serving as the Chair of his department.
**Life Member Dr Swapan Chattopadhyay, Associate Director for Accelerators at the US Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has been awarded the distinction of Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The award will be presented at the 2006 AAAS Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 18. For more details see http://www.jlab.org/div_dept/dir_off/public_affairs/news_releases/2005/fellow.html
**Professor B.N. Meera, Lecturer in the Department of Physics, Bangalore University, has been selected as the next American Physical Society Kilambi Ramavataram Fellow. Meera will spend an academic year with Professor Dean Zollman in the Department of Physics, Kansas State University starting Fall 2006. Meera has been awarded a Fulbright-Tata Travel Fellowship to enable her to travel to the US as a Kilambi Ramavataram Fellow. Meera works in the area of Physics Education Research. If you wish to contact Meera, please email her (meeri_bn@yahoo.com) with a copy to me sen@nsm.buffalo.edu (I am also the current Chair of this APS Fellowship program and would be happy to explore possible arrangements if you wish to invite Meera for a talk or if you wish to host her for a short period for collaborations, etc. She is committed to Professor Zollman until May 2007 but can potentially remain in the US in her capacity as a Fellow until August 2007).
**Professor Pratibha Jolly, Professor of Physics and Principal of Miranda House College, Delhi University chaired the International Conference on Physics Education 2005 in New Delhi, India between August 21-25, 2005. The Proceedings of ICPE will be published soon by World Scientific.
The details can be found in
**In 2004, Professor Ramanath Cowsik, formerly Director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and presently Professor of Physics at Washington University, St. Louis. has been named a Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences. For details see
http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/04202004?OpenDocument
**Professor G.S. Agarwal is now on leave of absence from Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India and is the Noble Foundation Chair and Professor of Physics at The Oklahoma State University. Professor Agarwal is noted for his many outstanding contributions to optical physics, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, stochastic processes, foundations of quantum theory and quantum information science. For details see