H ello to our fine PandA Alumni,

What a semester! New challenges, but also plenty of new successes to tell you about.

The situation with the federal government has overshadowed everything this semester. While the department hasn't had any grants cancelled, there have been numerous delays in decisions, creating a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. We don't know what science funding will look like in the next budget, but we worry that serious and lasting damage may be done to America's decades-long leadership in basic research. That would obviously have an awful impact on the department's mission.

But we try to stay optimistic and continue to pursue our strategic goals. The momentum behind Quantum in New Mexico continues: we welcomed Niklas Mueller to the faculty as a member of the Quantum New Mexico Institute (QNM-I); in the fall we'll welcome Francisco Salces Carcoba and UNM Optical Science and Engineering -PhD 2012 alum Denis Seletskiy as new faculty who will further strengthen our efforts in quantum optics and laser physics; QNM-I received $1.8M from the state legislature for various initiatives, an extremely encouraging development; and Quantinuum, a leading company in quantum computing, announced that they would open an office in New Mexico. It's all starting to happen. The search for a Director of QNM-I continues, and other center hires are in the pipeline. There are also quantum-related economic development initiatives going on, although we are more peripherally involved in them.

Our excitement about the desire of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to locate the science operations of the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) here at UNM continues. NRAO celebrated the handover of the prototype ngVLA antenna from the manufacturer in April at an event at the VLA site that I attended. You can read more about that below.

On a sad note, we lost Principal Lecturer Emeritus Mickey Odom to cancer in January. He served the department for many years and was one of the kindest and most considerate people you could imagine. Some of you may remember being a teaching assistant under his guidance. We miss him dearly.

Back to happier news, we got a wonderful donation of $250,000 from Mary Kurtz to start an undergraduate physics scholarship in honor of her late husband, physicist Steven R. Kurtz, who worked at Sandia for many years. We are extremely grateful to Mary for this endowment.

We also handed out the first ever Mansoor Sheik-Bahae award for the best dissertation in optics, made possible by many generous donations. The first winner was Xiaobing Zhu. Xiaobing completed a dissertation entitled “Phase Nanoscopy with Correlated Frequency Combs” under the supervision of Professor Jean-Claude Diels.

The push for a new Campus Observatory continues, but we are at a challenging moment. We need to raise its priority on UNM's list of capital projects before we can proceed with the full design study. We'll be working on that over the coming year.

Our Alumni Highlight this time is Dr. Katie Richardson. She has had a unique and interesting career path since leaving UNM, and she gave our Convocation Address this year. We love it when she returns for a visit!

Happy reading!