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Ann's Story
I arrived at Hamilton College in August of 1989 - hard to believe it's been almost 20 years. I brought to the job some research experience in the field of laser spectroscopy and a little graduate school teaching experience. After starting graduate school in 1979 at the University of Wisconsin, I finished my experimental work at the Australian National University in Canberra, and did an industrial post-doc at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. I was attracted to Hamilton because the department felt very much like the department at Oberlin College, where I spent four great years as an undergraduate. It was at Oberlin that I decided that a teaching career at a small college was for me.
I've continued to do laser spectroscopy, studying optical properties of materials containing rare-earth dopants. Over the years I've been fortunate to have terrific student collaborators and also have two collaborators who teach at other colleges: Dan Boye who teaches physics at Davidson College, and Kurt Hoffman of Whitman College. Over the years we've taken students to the University of Georgia for holeburning experiments, presented posters at DPC in Lyon, France (2001), Christchurch, NZ (2003), and Segovia, Spain (2007). In 2008 I attended ICL, again in Lyon. Another research adventure that I enjoyed a while ago was a 1998 return to ANU for a (too) short sabbatical. My PhD advisor, Neil Manson, has a much expanded group there that is housed in the Laser Physics Centre. Jim and I had a great time renewing old friendships and introducing all of our Australian friends to Kevin and Rob.
Here are a couple photos from my trip last year to France. I gave a talk titled "Fluorescence yield in rare-earth doped sol-gel silicate glasses" and also found time to hang out with my Mom.
The family photo below was taken summer 2007 near Gull lake in the Adirondack Park.
My student Nguyen and I had a great time in Segovia, Spain at DPC'07. Here we are presenting our poster.
Nguyen took a beautiful photo of downtown Segovia at night.
Here (above) we are being tourists! I got to see Neil and Pat Manson too. The photo below shows me with them and Frank and Mary Imbush.
