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Ann's Story
I arrived at Hamilton College in August of 1989 - hard to believe it's been over 25 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. We've done most of our work in our own laboratories. With our students, we have presented posters at DPC in Lyon, France (2001), Christchurch, NZ (2003), Segovia, Spain (2007), and Argonne National Lab (2010).We've been to ICL inWroclaw (2014,) Ann Arbor (2011,) and Lyon (2008). Here is a photo from the recent ICL poster session in Wroclaw, Poland : me with a poster reporting thesis work by Alex Huss ('14) and summer work by Kevin Rovelli ('15).
Below is a recent-ish (summer 2012) family photo, taken in Vella, Switzerland. Kevin (then a grad student in math at UW-Milwaukee; now getting ready to move to UMichigan for a post-doc), me, Rob (grad student in math at UMichigan), Jim.
And our beloved Yahtzee at Moss Lake in the Adirondacks. She will turn 14 this fall.
Some older photos from wonderful work-related trips: Here are a couple photos from my 2008 trip to Lyon.
(I gave a talk titled "Fluorescence yield in rare-earth doped sol-gel silicate glasses" and also had time to hang out with my Mom.)
My student Nguyen and I had a great time in Segovia, Spain at DPC'07. Nguyen just graduated from University of Chicago with a PhD in mathematics and is a post-doc at Northwestern.
Nguyen took a beautiful photo of downtown Segovia at night.
I got to see Neil and Pat Manson in Segovia too. The photo below shows me with them and Frank and Mary Imbush.
