Welcome to new faculty members Daniel Brandenburg, Jackie Chini, Mike Chini, Geraldine Cochran, Kaeli Hughes, and Pierre Heidmann!
Daniel Brandenburg
Assistant professor
My name is James Daniel Brandenburg (I go by Daniel) and I started as an assistant professor in the physics department in January 2023. My research is in nuclear experiment. I conduct research at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as part of the STAR collaboration. Using this collider, we study a hot and dense form of nuclear matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma that is produced momentarily when heavy nuclei smash together at nearly the speed of light. My research has recently focused on the effects of the ultra-strong electromagnetic fields produced in heavy-ion collisions. In 2019 I published the STAR measurement demonstrating that these ultra-strong electromagnetic fields can be used to achieve the Breit-Wheeler process, the simplest process in Quantum Electrodynamics for converting light quanta (photons) into matter and anti-matter (in the form of an electron-positron pair). This discovery paved the way for my recent work in which I am imaging the internal structure of heavy nuclei to understand the ‘glue’ that binds nuclear matter together. My current work led to the observation of a novel quantum phenomenon in which the wavefunctions of distinguishable but entangled particles interfere allowing sub-diffraction limited imaging of the protons and neutrons inside nuclei. For this research I was awarded a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2022 and I recently received the 2023 Department of Energy Early Career Award to continue new research in this same direction.
What brought you to Ohio State?
Before coming to The Ohio State University, I was a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. While I greatly enjoyed the environment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, I have always known that I wanted to be at a university. Unlike the national laboratory environment, universities’ positions offer the opportunity to enrich students through teaching and through advising PhD students in a research group. I like the environment of a large university like Ohio State due to the diversity of students and academic departments. One thing I found very attractive about the university is the opportunity to develop relationships with colleagues exploring other fields of physics. I really enjoy being able to attend colloquia on other topics to expand my physics horizons. Such cross-discipline interaction challenges me and helps me to connect my work to others’ interests outside of nuclear physics.
In addition to the strength of the physics department in general, The Ohio State University was also a very attractive option for me due to the international recognition of the existing nuclear experiment and theory groups. As a young researcher, I have greatly benefited from and gained great respect for the contributions of the nuclear experiment and nuclear theory faculty at Ohio State. Being able to join a group whose faculty have such a respected reputation and whose work has so significantly contributed to my development as a researcher causes me to feel a great sense of accomplishment, inspiration and responsibility.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
As I start my career at The Ohio State University, I am eager to get to know others in the department and to develop my unique role as a new member of the physics department. I am excited to work with and learn from the other faculty in the nuclear theory and experimental groups as I develop my independent research program. I am especially excited to initiate and lead Ohio State’s involvement in the Electron Ion Collider project, the next generation nuclear physics experiment in the United States. Through this role I will have the challenge and opportunity to develop Ohio State’s role in the developing program and to attract future talent to the nuclear experiment group.
What advice would you offer to students?
I would encourage students to try to enjoy the stage of life and academic career that they are currently in. It’s easy to constantly look to the next milestone, whether that’s graduating, going to grad school or finishing a PhD thesis. As an undergraduate or graduate student, life can get busy and complicated - between classes, social life, sleeping and eating it can be hard to balance everything, even harder to enjoy it. But I think it is important to take time to slow down and reflect on what we are studying and why, especially for physics students. While we all have a different personal reason for studying physics, one of them is undoubtedly because we personally enjoy the challenge and satisfaction of understanding nature’s secrets. Life as a student is a unique opportunity to focus on learning the foundations of physics for yourself and to discover some of the aspects of nature that intrigue you most. So, my advice to students is to learn about the big questions in each field of physics - try to ask your professors about their research and attend some colloquia or talks on a topic that’s new to you. That way, no matter what you do in the future, whether that’s a career in physics or something else, you will look back on your physics education as a positive and exciting part of your life.
Jackie Chini
Associate professor
I work in the area of physics education research. I am specifically interested in accessibility and inclusion in physics teaching, learning, and research as well as the physics community and workforce overall. I completed my undergraduate degree at Drew University, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey, where I developed a dual love for physics and sociology. My physics advisor knew that one graduate from our program had gone into graduate school for physics education research, actually at Ohio State! He thought that area of research may be a great way to combine my interests. I did a research experience for undergraduates (REU) at Kansas State University in PER and returned there for graduate school. Many active learning practices have been shown to benefit physics learning at the class level and for some subgroups, but disability identity has not frequently been explored in postsecondary STEM education research. I live with both mental health and chronic health conditions and have experienced personally and from peers how environments can either enable or disable participation. My goal is to use research to create enabling physics environments.
What brought you to Ohio State?
I have known the other faculty in physics education research, both in the physics department and in education, for many years. I am so excited to get to work with them! I was also impressed by Ohio State’s commitment to equity through the RAISE initiative. I had not previously been to Columbus, but on my visits so far I have loved exploring the Metro Parks and eating Jeni’s ice cream.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
I am lucky to be hired at the same time as three other STEM discipline-based education researchers (DBER) across physics and chemistry as well as to join existing DBER folks in sciences, engineering and education. I am most excited to connect with these new colleagues!
What advice would you offer to students?
I encourage students to follow their passions and try out opportunities that come their way. Working on multiple projects during my undergraduate years helped me to identify both what I was and what I was not interested in.
Anything else you would like to share?
Students often ask about my connection with the other Dr. Chini in the department! He is indeed my husband. We have a seven-year-old named Josiah and two black-and-white mutts named Lola and Ellie. I love exercising as well as baking and crafting with Josiah.
Mike Chini
Associate professor
I am an experimentalist who works in the field of attosecond science. We generate flashes of light in the extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray spectral regions and use them to track the fast motion of electrons in atoms, molecules and solids. Electrons are the “glue” that hold atoms together in molecules and solids, and electronic excitations are the first step in a number of important processes in chemistry and condensed matter physics. More recently, I’ve become fascinated with the idea of using carefully sculpted ultrafast light fields to control the properties of materials. In certain classes of materials, for example monolayer-thick 2D materials, small external perturbations can cause significant changes in the electronic and optical properties. Our recent work seems to indicate that exposing these materials to strong light fields can lead to new “light-matter” states that can’t be accessed with more conventional condensed matter tools like temperature, pressure or doping. These states only last a few femtoseconds, but luckily we have the attosecond tools needed to observe them!
On a day-to-day basis, my research involves working with laser technology which is really at the frontiers of human achievement. Since the invention of the laser in 1960, scientists have gradually developed the tools to control light across essentially every axis of parameter space and with ever-increasing levels of precision. I started my undergraduate career with the intention of studying the physics of sound, and I think of the lasers I work with as a well-tuned orchestra that I have the special opportunity to conduct.
What brought you to Ohio State?
Ohio State has been at the center of attosecond science for more than two decades, as exemplified by the 2023 Nobel Prize being awarded to Pierre Agostini for his seminal work in characterizing attosecond pulses. Of course, it is attractive to come to a department with such a strong legacy in my field of research. Even more exciting, however, is what is to come: The NSF NeXUS (National Extreme Ultrafast Science) Facility will come online this year, which is a user facility for attosecond science. The facility is based around a high-power laser system coupled to several advanced experimental end-stations for gas-phase physics and chemistry, surface science and solid-state physics, and it is expected to expand access to attosecond techniques and bring researchers from other fields into the community. I expect NeXUS to have a huge impact on the attosecond community, and Ohio State to grow as THE major hub for attosecond science in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
Building a new laboratory is always exciting and I’ve had experience doing it as both a graduate student and as a PI. There are also a lot of neat things happening in the laser technology community, which makes this a particularly exciting time to be able to start a new lab. I think what I’m most excited about is getting back into laser development. When I was a graduate student and postdoc, the lasers were mainly home-built and I was involved in designing and building the lasers that I ultimately got to use for experiments. In my current lab, however, we have transitioned mainly to turn-key industrial laser platforms. At Ohio State, my labs will have a balance between turn-key lasers for running experiments that demand reliability and home-built custom systems capable of really pushing the state-of-the-art, and so I’m excited to be able to get back to my roots in laser technology development.
What advice would you offer to students?
As a junior faculty member, I was told that “happy physicists do good physics,” and I think this is an important aspect of being a physicist that can get lost in the stress of classes, qualifiers and publishing. My main advice to students is to try to take care of yourself mentally and physically, and to avoid getting hung up on things that are beyond your control. You can’t control whether another group beats you to a good result, or whether a reviewer likes your paper, but you can control how you respond to challenges and setbacks.
Anything else you would like to share?
Outside of the lab, I like listening to punk music and doing cryptic crosswords.
Geraldine Cochran
Associate professor
I conduct equity-oriented physics education research. I like to think of equity-oriented work as identifying and addressing or mitigating the negative impact of things that are unjust or unfair.
What brought you to Ohio State?
I am excited to join the physics department at Ohio State because it has a physics education research group that was supportive and excited about my interest in doing equity-oriented work. I was also excited to return to the Midwest, being geographically closer to my family in Chicago.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
I am most excited about my work on the Inclusive Graduate Physics Programs Collaborative funded by the National Science Foundation – Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate. As a part of this project, I get to work with faculty, staff and students across 16 institutions that are striving to make the culture within physics graduate programs more inclusive. From a programmatic perspective, we are building a community of people who will be able to learn from each other's successes and failures. From a research perspective, we will document efforts to improve inclusion and identify challenges to doing so. Additionally, we will gain a better understanding of the pathways for physics graduate students, particularly the milestones they face, the ways in which their departmental support structure changes, and stopping points that may hinder their persistence.
What advice would you offer to students?
My advice to students is to follow your passion. I don’t always have a grand plan. I only took physics in high school because I wanted to go to an amusement park, Six Flags Great America, for free. I joined my first physics education research project because I wanted to work with middle school students in my community on the Southside of Chicago. I tend to pursue opportunities because they are connected to or allow me to pursue something about which I’m passionate. That’s seemed to me work for me thus far; so, I encourage it.
Anything else you would like to share?
I am an introverted extrovert; so, I really enjoy social interactions. I encourage students to come to my office with or without something planned to discuss. A fun fact is that I used to be proficient in Tagalog. I can still hold a conversation, but I need practice.
Kaeli Hughes
Assistant professor
My name is Kaeli Hughes and I am an assistant professor with the Department of Physics. I am an experimental astrophysicist and I am especially interested in learning about the most energetic accelerators in the Universe. To investigate this, I build neutrino detectors in some of the most extreme environments in the world, including at the South Pole, in the middle of the Greenlandic Ice Sheet and on a balloon bound for space. The data we take is in the radio frequency band, so I spend a lot of my time investigating background radio signals, figuring out new ways to analyze our data sets and going to the sites and installing the experiments themselves!
What brought you to Ohio State?
I am an Ohio State alumna, so I am thrilled to be back! I love the Columbus area, especially the metro parks and the Olentangy trail. I really love the culture of Ohio State too - I felt supported and valued throughout my time as an undergraduate and I’m excited to be part of that same environment as a faculty member and a mentor. Something else that really impressed me about Ohio State was how many people I met during my visits who had been working at Ohio State for decades. As an academic, there is always a pressure to keep moving on to the next job, the next project, the next career stage. And it really appealed to me to pick a place like Ohio State that would encourage me and my family to settle down, potentially for good.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
I’m excited to get my lab set up! The space is finally ready to be filled with science equipment, which I’ll start purchasing now. And I’m excited to start working with postdocs and graduate students to get my projects up and running here at Ohio State. I am also looking forward to teaching - I know lots of students in lots of majors take some type of intro physics course, and I hope to become better and better at teaching those courses over the course of my career.
What advice would you offer to students?
My first piece of advice is don’t focus on the big goal, focus on lots of little goals. It’s daunting to map out your career trajectory starting at 18! Instead, just try to do one thing a little better than you did before. Maybe that’s doing an extra practice problem a week before the exam. Maybe that’s applying for an REU program that you think sounds interesting. Maybe that’s going to office hours for your favorite class and developing a relationship with your professors so they can write you letters of recommendation! Each of these things can help you have a well-rounded portfolio by the time you graduate and each of them will take less time than you imagine.
My second piece of advice: Fred Rogers once said that during times of disaster, to “look for the helpers.” I would like to encourage you to be the helpers. It is our responsibility as physicists and as humans to participate and exist in the world in a way that makes things better for as many people as possible. Really take time to think about how you can make things better: for your classmates, for your community and for the world. Doing even a little bit of good, and really thinking critically about how you can put your talents toward helping others, is absolutely worth the time and energy.
Anything else you would like to share?
I am a huge Ohio State football fan - I’ve been going to games with my dad since I was a kid. I can’t wait to buy season tickets this year!
Pierre Heidmann
Assistant professor
I am Pierre Heidmann, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. I completed the majority of my education in France, earning my bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon and Paris. I specialized in theoretical physics, focusing on High Energy Physics and string theory during my PhD thesis at CEA Saclay in Paris. In this initial research experience, my work centered on exploring the fundamental nature of black holes in string theory. Following this enriching experience, I spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. During this period, I established my own research line, dedicated to studying the fundamental aspects of gravity and quantum gravity. My goal is to comprehend the emergence of new objects that can help explain the nature of black holes while also manifesting in various ways within our universe.
What brought you to Ohio State?
After spending four years in the United States as a postdoctoral fellow, I was eager to take a significant step forward by applying for professor positions. Additionally, U.S. universities are renowned for their tradition of providing excellent support to young researchers, offering high-quality resources and financial assistance at the beginning of their professorial careers. Therefore, I aimed to apply for a professorial position in the U.S., and my interest led me to consider Ohio State.
Choosing Ohio State was simpler than it might seem for several reasons. Unfortunately, the job market in High Energy Physics string theory is quite limited. In the previous year, only two universities, UCLA and Ohio State, opened positions in this specific field of research. Fortunately, I secured the position here. While this might appear somewhat arbitrary, I was genuinely thrilled to be accepted at Ohio State. My enthusiasm stemmed from the strong appeal of the Department of Physics here, which presented significant potential for collaborations with existing researchers. Moreover, the department covered a diverse range of topics, including particle physics, condensed matter, and astrophysics – all of which align with my areas of interest. This alignment, along with the university's supportive environment, made Ohio State an ideal choice for advancing my academic career.
What do you most look forward to during your first year here?
I am genuinely thrilled about the prospects for the upcoming year. Securing this assistant professor position represents a significant opportunity for me to further develop my research interests and evolve as a theoretical physicist. The prospect of establishing a group of talented young researchers, including PhD students and postdocs, and guiding their work within my area of expertise has always been a compelling aspiration. I feel fortunate to have the chance to realize this vision at Ohio State.
Moreover, I am eagerly anticipating the teaching aspect of my role here. The opportunity to communicate scientific concepts to a diverse range of individuals has always interested me. I firmly believe that physics should be accessible to a broad spectrum of students, each with their unique perspectives. Physics serves as a powerful tool for questioning the world around us and I am enthusiastic about imparting this valuable lesson to a wide audience.
What advice would you offer to students?
Each journey in the academic world is profoundly personal, and what one person considers necessary for success may not resonate with another. Therefore, my foremost advice to students aspiring to follow this path is to listen to themselves and construct their own set of guiding principles that instill confidence and propel them forward. Everyone operates differently, so it is crucial not to let others dictate how one should navigate this journey. Perseverance and self-confidence emerge as crucial elements. Rather than adhering to a one-size-fits-all approach, recognize your unique strengths and working style. Trust in your abilities and maintain a resilient spirit. Ultimately, success in academia is a highly individualized pursuit and embracing your own path with determination is key.
