Alumni list. Information and websites for BS and BA graduates of the University of Kentucky Department of Physics and Astronomy.  All alumni are invited to contribute to this page. Send your contributions, by mail to: John Christopher, Department of Physics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0055 or e-mail: jchris@pop.uky.edu.

Robert Arts - http://campus.pc.edu/faculty/rarts/

Mike Barnett - http://inkido.indiana.edu/mikeb/

T. R. Girill   I graduated with a B.S. in Physics (Phi Beta Kappa) from U.K.
in 1968.  Although I worked as a "physicist" only briefly (for the
summer before graduate school, at Eastman Kodak Company), my undergraduate
physics background has benefited me in every subsequent career role,
however diverse.  I have worked closely with engineers for years, but
I'm glad that did not major in engineering (a close second choice at the
time).  And I have two degrees in the humanities (M.A., 1970, and
Ph.D., 1973, in Philosophy, from the University of California at Berkeley),
but I'm glad that I did not major in philosophy or German (though both
recruited me actively) as an undergraduate.

     Physics both inspired and enabled my life-long interest in the
philosophy of science, which I pursued in graduate school, during a
brief period of teaching and publishing, and avocationally ever since.
It also gave me a solid technical background ideal for my second career,
as a professional technical writer.  I spent 18 years on the staff of the
U.S. Department of Energy's National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer
Center (later called the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center),
where I not only wrote thousands of pages of software documentation
to help physics researchers use the system but was also privileged to
join with (human-factors oriented) software engineers and supervise
student interns from Cal's library school as we developed innovative
techniques to more effectively deliver information online.  Many of these
techniques were subsequently copied by the National Science Foundation
computer centers (such as NCSA and SDSC) and reported in papers rated
among the most influential to appear in the Journal of the American
Society for Information Science.

     Along the way, whether teaching professional development courses
at University of California Extension or collaborating with DOE colleagues
on departmentwide strategic plans (where I met other UK graduates), I
always found my undergraduate physics major a most appropriate basis
for turning intellectual opportunities into rewarding adventures.  Those
adventures culminated in 1999 when the international Society for
Technical Communication (STC) elected me a Fellow.  Since STC's annual
conference that year happened to be in Cincinnati, I was able to return
to the U.K. campus for the first time since graduation in 1968 to visit
the (now mature) Physics Building, as well as the new library (to which
I have been a long-time donor).  This year (2000) I wrap up my 5-year
term as editor in chief of the Association for Computing Machinery's
Journal of Computer Documentation just in time to join in a serious
local effort to promote literacy (including technical literacy) among
underperforming high-school students.

     Mine has not been the obvious or typical path forward from a physics
B.S.  But it has been a satisfying path and one well-enabled by what
I learned in the U.K. Physics Department 30 years ago.

T. R. Girill
University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
trg@llnl.gov

John Hazle - http://utmdacc.uth.tmc.edu/~resrep/4/HazleJ.html

David Kirn - www.aesthetic-plastic.md

Terrell L. Noffsinger - My work toward a graduate degree in physics at UK was interrupted by World war II. I volunteered for the Army Air Corps in 1942 and was trained in
meteorology at the University of Chicago. I served as a weather officer in
the Army Air Corps in N. Africa, Sicily, England and France during the War. I
served as an Air Force Meteorologist in Japan during a second tour of duty in
the Korean War. Following the Korean War I obtained my Ph.D. from Purdue
University, served as climatologist and professor of meteorology(for three
years) at the University of Hawaii, and then the Chief if the Agricultural
Weather Service (in Washington, DC) from 1961 through 1976. From 1980 through
1985 I worked with the Thai Meteorological Service and with the Peace Corps
in Thailand. I am now retired and living on a small farm in Logan County
Kentucky.

Donna Pierce - I'm now a post-qualifier graduate student in the astronomy department
at the University of Maryland.  I have received my M.S., and I've just
started Ph.D. work.  I'm working with a prominent comet researcher,
Michael A'Hearn, observing and modeling the infrared and optical spectra
from comets.  He is the principal investigator for a new NASA mission,
Deep Impact, which will probe the interior of comet Tempel-1 in 2005.
My thesis will be a pre-launch thesis, and the results will be directly
applied to the analysis of the data we will receive from the mission.
If you would like to learn more about the Deep Impact mission, go to
the following sites:
U Maryland page:  http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/deepimpact/
Ball Aerospace page:  http://www.ball.com/aerospace/deepimpact.html
I now have a personal website.  It is still undergoing construction,
but there's enough up to be interesting:  http://www.astro.umd.edu/~pierce/

Phillip Price

I graduated from U.K. with a physics PhD in 1992, and came to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a post-doc working on a project to locate high-radon homes in the United States. At the conclusion of the post-doc, I was hired as a scientist in the Indoor Environment Department. We study things like the "sick building syndrome," the relationship between ventilation and productivity, and other subjects related to indoor air quality and other environmental factors. I've published about two refereed papers per year on a variety of subjects including radon, spatial statistics, and computed tomography.

I enjoy living in Berkeley with my wife and three cats...if you want to know more about me and about what I've done, check out my web site at http://www.creekcats.com/pnprice, and feel free to email me at pnprice@lbl.gov

Shadow Robinson - http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/people/pips/Robinson.html

Mike Singer - http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~mas034/mike.html