Upcoming Meeting

The Fall Meeting of the Mississippi Association of Physicists will be held at the Mississippi State University Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) in Canton, Mississippi.

Click here for a tentative schedule of events along with hotel information.

Here are directions from Jackson

Participate! Do you have an interesting optics demonstration other teachers might find useful? If so, bring it along. For this meeting, we are inviting all attendees to bring along a brief demonstration in the field of optics. Each demo should be about 2-3 minutes long, but time may vary depending on how many we have.

Presentations

Richard W. Peterson

(Bethel University) - Lasers and optics in interferometric and holographic measurements. Dr. Petersons research interests involve new methods of performing highly-transient interferometric and holographic measurements. Dick was awarded the 1998 American Physical Society's (APS) Prize for outstanding research at an undergraduate school in the U.S. and was elected a Fellow of the APS in 2005. During 2005 - 2007 he served as national President/Past President of AAPT and has also served 4 years as a Director on the AIP Governing Board

Rod Schwartz

(Nissan North America) - Automobile manufacturing. Rod is the Engineering Manager of the Body and Stamping plants in Nissans 3.5 million square foot automotive manufacturing facility located in Canton, MS. The responsibilities of his team of 20+ Engineers includes controlling the intricate manufacturing processes required to build any one of the five different vehicles produced in Canton, while maintaining the high levels of repeatability required in todays efficient world of mass production. Rod will use his 20 years of automotive experience to convey the processes and functions of an automotive assembly plant capable of producing over 400,000 vehicles per year.

Mark Cavaglia

(University of Mississippi) - Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Mississippi. Dr. Cavaglias current research interests focus on gravitational waves and black holes physics. He collaborates to the German Max-Planck Institut Outreach Program "Einstein Online", the Italian "Science for All" and the National Geographic KIDS Magazine. The NSF-sponsored LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) consists of more than 500 scientists from 47 institutions worldwide, working together to achieve the first-ever detection of a gravitational wave. One of the three LSC interferometers is located near Livingston (LA), about two hours south of Jackson MS. Researchers at the University of Mississippi will contribute in the areas of data analysis, detector characterization and outreach.