The far-reaching grant will supply UC Berkeley and its partner institutions’ advanced quantum research hub with $37.5 million in funding over the next five years to address three priority research challenges: discovering and realizing the power of quantum computation, understanding nature through the lens of quantum information science, and developing quantum technologies and their applications.

“For more than four decades, NSF has been laying the foundational groundwork of research and discovery that is powering today’s modern quantum computing, sensing and communication,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “It’s time for focused activities to leverage that base of knowledge to drive us even farther forward to the benefit of all Americans. The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are a next step for us in understanding the quantum world we live in.”

The renewal of the NSF CIQC will feature several new initiatives. Cal State San Marcos and Cal State East Bay will anchor plans to establish systemwide degree programs in quantum information science, and the Computer History Museum and Berkeley Oral History Center will document the history of quantum computing in real time as it unfolds.

“We pride ourselves on creating exceptional opportunities for our students and connecting them with cutting-edge work that is shaping the future.” said Charles De Leone, dean of graduate studies and research at CSUSM. “Being part of the CIQC is a great example of that commitment. This partnership gives our students access to a field that is rapidly advancing and creates opportunities they might not find at many other universities. We’re proud to be part of this effort and to help prepare the next generation of California’s quantum workforce.”

“By uniting world-renowned research institutions and partnering with the California State University system, the CIQC will not only address long-term challenges in quantum computing, it will also expand access to education and career pathways,” said Justin Perron, a physics professor at CSUSM. “This effort builds on CSUSM’s leadership in quantum education and workforce development, and we are excited to work with our CIQC partners to build California’s quantum future at such a pivotal time.”

The NSF CIQC was founded in 2020, as one of the five original NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes motivated by the National Quantum Initiative Act’s call to strengthen America’s scientific leadership in foundational quantum information research.

True to the nature of quantum information science, the institute is multidisciplinary, combining expertise in chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics. Researchers explore how to harness quantum systems to create next-generation technologies for sensors, computing and communications.

Through collaborative efforts over the past six years, the institute’s researchers have stress-tested claims of quantum computers that outperform classical ones, stimulating aggressive development by the quantum industry. By asking how quantum information evolves within physical systems, they discovered new kinds of phase transitions and established rigorous insights on the structure of quantum matter. They also advanced frontier research on neutral-atom platforms for quantum computing, setting the stage for the current explosion of activity and investment in such systems.

“The renewal and expansion of the NSF CIQC is a momentous event for the field of quantum science and for the quantum ecosystem in the state of California,” said Shimon Kolkowitz, the Herst Chair in Physics at UC Berkeley. “This center enables and enhances large-scale academic collaboration on basic quantum research at a pivotal moment for the field.”

By linking leading quantum research teams and educational initiatives across the state of California, the NSF CIQC serves as the backbone of an integrated, statewide ecosystem. UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology are core research partners.

The renewal of the institute recognizes the growing energy around quantum and builds on the long history of exceptional quantum research in California. Notably, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus John Clarke, together with his former postdoctoral fellow Michel Devoret and graduate student John Martinis (both now on the UC Santa Barbara faculty), for quantum tunneling experiments that lay the groundwork for today’s superconducting quantum computers.

Perron is leading a three-year, $1,085,815 project supported by the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, targeting one of the most demanding areas in modern science: quantum information science and technology (QIST).  

The effort builds on a previous Department of Energy RENEW award that equipped CSU undergraduate faculty to integrate quantum concepts into their courses. Now Perron is tackling the next barrier: getting students hands-on experience with the technology itself. 

"Most undergraduate QIST education is theoretical or textbook-focused," Perron said. "While simulations and cloud-accessible systems are valuable, the quantum sector also needs scientists and engineers with hands-on experience operating these systems. Because quantum technology is expensive and typically limited to research and industry settings, most students don't have access to that kind of training." 

Perron’s team is developing a curriculum that teaches core QIST lab competencies without requiring access to a full quantum system. The model will draw on data from quantum industry stakeholders to define workforce needs, then design and test the curriculum at CSUSM and partner institutions, measuring its effectiveness from the perspectives of students, faculty and potential employers. 

While Perron’s project focuses on preparing students for emerging careers in quantum science, other newly funded CSUSM projects are reimagining how students engage with mathematics and biology from the start of their academic journeys. 

"It's exciting to see our faculty leading nationally competitive projects that connect research and teaching in powerful ways," said Charles De Leone, dean of graduate studies and research. "These grants reflect what's possible at an institution like ours, where faculty are deeply invested in student success and bring that commitment into cutting-edge work." 

Additional projects funded this academic year include: 

• Rethinking the gateway to calculus 
  A $173,098 grant from the National Science Foundation supports a collaborative project led by mathematics professor Kimberly Ayers, in partnership with Florida International University, Clark College and the University of Virginia. The project introduces a more interactive model for teaching introductory calculus, a course that serves as a gateway to most STEM majors but has some of the highest failure and withdrawal rates nationally in undergraduate education. 
  Rather than lecture-centered instruction, students work in small groups to solve problems and explain their thinking out loud, building procedural skills alongside the mathematical confidence that research shows is essential to staying in STEM. The collaboration across four institutions allows the team to test the approach across different student populations and refine what works.
• Putting field research into the biology curriculum 
  Funded with a $499,970 grant from the National Science Foundation, a project led by biology professors Mallory Rice, George Vourlitis and Jane Kim will embed hands-on, community-driven scientific research directly into biology courses at CSUSM. Students will investigate biological questions about how urban development is affecting wildlife and natural resources across North San Diego County.
• Building the region’s behavioral and mental health workforce 
  CSUSM received a $450,000 grant from the County of San Diego to help strengthen the region’s health and human services workforce through a partnership with the county’s Health and Human Services Agency and San Diego State University.
• Preparing future public health leaders 
  Kim Pulvers, a professor of psychology, and Richard Armenta, an associate professor of kinesiology, received a competitive renewal award for the Research & Action for Community Health (REACH): CSUSM/UCSD Smoke and Vape Free Scholars Program in partnership with UC San Diego. The program trains undergraduate and master’s students to address tobacco-related health disparities through research, community engagement and public health workforce development. Since the program’s launch in 2022, scholars have presented their work more than 30 times, published nine papers and gone on to graduate programs and health-related careers. This $1,331,620 grant is funded by the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. 

“What’s especially meaningful about these projects is the way they connect research, teaching and workforce preparation,” De Leone said. 

Research funding is an integral part of CSUSM’s “Blueprint for the Future” fundraising campaign, helping advance the university’s $200 million goal through both philanthropy and grants. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Perry wasn’t worried about pay or even the tasks he would be doing. He simply wanted an opportunity to gain some hands-on experience. 

It wasn’t an easy sell, even if CSUSM is known for high-impact, experiential learning. Perry wasn’t a physics major (he was studying mathematics at the time), and he didn’t have any lab experience. 

Perry wasn’t having much luck when he knocked on the door of physics professor Stephen Tsui. 

“He just said, ‘Sure, why not?’ ” Perry said. 

The simple gesture was the catalyst for Perry’s switch to physics and the beginning of his journey to co-founding TP Engineering Services, a Poway-based company that builds laser and electro-optic systems for defense and fusion applications.  

The company has flourished since its founding in 2017, but a fusion contract that it secured three years ago has accelerated its growth. 

“It’s pretty insane to think about us getting to this point already,” Perry said. “Did I ever think we'd get here? Yeah, but I had no idea what it was going to look like, and I had no idea how it was going to happen.” 

The experience is similar to the one Perry had at CSUSM, where he practically lived in Science Hall 2 as a student. In fact, he was there so early and so late that the physics department eventually entrusted him with keys and after-hours access to conduct his work. 

“That was my thing – just being in a lab setting, being around hardware, being around something that was tangible, something that wasn't just theoretical,” he said. “It was where I could put my hands on hardware and get some experience.” 

After graduating in 2016, Perry headed north to UC Santa Cruz, where he earned a master’s in phototonics. His master’s thesis – on the design and development of a deep ultraviolet fiber laser system – caught the eye of a defense contractor who funded the project, leading to the formation of TP Engineering with his mother and father. 

TP Engineering quickly grew from an optics table in Perry’s bedroom where they navigated every project to the Poway lab it calls home today. The company has expanded from the initial trio of co-founders to over 20 employees, including two from CSUSM. 

The university still holds a special place in Perry’s heart. It’s where he met his wife, Amanda, who earned a bachelor’s in kinesiology. More than a decade after they met while both lived on campus in the University Village Apartments, they welcomed daughter Elli, who will be 3 years old in December. And he still returns to campus every year for Super STEM Saturday, an annual one-day science festival that brings thousands of community members to campus. 

A longtime supporter of CSUSM Giving Day, Perry increased his contribution last year with a matching gift for the physics department. 

“He's an alum who really believes in giving back,” Tsui said. “It's nice that so many of our graduates remember us so fondly and want to see younger alums and students do well.” 

That’s certainly the case for Perry. He doesn’t take for granted the impact that people like Tsui had on him and his career. 

“CSUSM took a chance on me a long time ago, and I want to support them being able to give other students a chance as well,” Perry said. “My professors gave me a unique perspective on life. If Dr. Tsui hadn't given me that opportunity to work in his lab, I don't know if any of this would have happened. They gave me a chance, and that changed me forever.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Sessions will be held from Saturday, March 8 through Thursday, March 13. 

Saturday will be a “mini-event” that is 45 minutes and free for all participants. On Sunday-Thursday, the event is 90 minutes and $4 per person. Reservations are required and can be made online.

No science background is necessary. The event is intended for groups of 4-8 people ages 12 and up.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

After moving to a new state during the COVID-19 pandemic and experiencing the unexpected loss of a colleague, Cal State San Marcos physics lecturer Claudia Torres Garibay knew she needed an outlet that would rejuvenate. In childhood, she was a proud and energetic writer who earned awards. But her joy for writing turned to fear and avoidance for many years, as she faced language barriers while learning English as a second language and placed her professional focus on obtaining a career in engineering.

In October 2020, she rediscovered the joy brought by writing fiction and moved this hobby to the front burner once again.

Torres Garibay  received news that she was among 100 authors selected to be published in an anthology. The San Diego Decameron Project Anthology, shares 100 fiction stories loosely based around experiences shared during the COVID-19 pandemic. This anthology was inspired by “The Decameron,” a book also composed of 100 stories, but written by the singular author, Giovanni Boccaccio. “The Decameron” depicts experiences shared during the Black Death, or bubonic plague, which killed more than 25 million people in Western Eurasia and North Africa during the years  1347-1351.

In May 2023, Torres Garibay shared the recognition “Author of the Month” along three other featured authors in the Decameron Project Anthology. The event took place at the San Diego Central Library, where she read her short story, “Lost and Found.”

In “Lost and Found,” Torres Garibay tells the story of a man who, after experiencing furlough, must find a way to fill holes in his life and make himself whole again. He welcomes certain changes that the pandemic brings; mask policies allow him to cover his physical insecurities, isolation policies allow him to celebrate his introversion, and the slower move of the world allows him to uncover physical sensations like the smell of his home and the songs of birds in a quiet street.

But the pandemic also causes him to slowly lose much. He finds himself spending the days longing for the comfort of a friendly smile – one that belongs to his admirable landlady and dear friend. And when a tragic loss occurs, the protagonist must discover a new way to finally repair the holes in his heart.

“The story starts with somebody who cannot find toilet paper, which was the first thing that I noticed when the pandemic began,” Torres Garibay said. “People often felt they were missing so much, but sometimes something as simple as toilet paper reminds us of what we really need.”

Much like the protagonist, hardships during the pandemic required Torres Garibay to reevaluate how she measured fulfillment and how much she relied on material possessions. She would find that happiness was better measured by internal qualities and human connections.

In light of this, Torres Garibay’s plans to tackle English short fiction and poetry. The representational symbolism frequently found in these forms of literature does pose an opportune challenge, however. Torres Garibay is looking forward to learning ways to compartmentalize writing for poetry and writing for her profession as a physics and engineering professor at Cal State San Marcos.

“I think that in engineering, creativity is shown in different ways in terms of solutions to problems. But sometimes those solutions don't give you too much strength to be artistic,” Torres Garibay said. “And that's an area I realized I love in my life. I want to continue to be artistic, and so I will.”

“Lost and Found” can be read online and the entire San Diego Decameron Anthology Project can be reserved through the San Diego Central Library or can be read online. Hard copies of the anthology will also be available soon.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The grand opening kicked off with a half-day symposium on condensed matter physics education. As part of the Quantum Design Education Initiative, the Teaching & Materials Discovery Lab located in Room 206 of Science Hall 2 provides hands-on experience in performing state-of-the-art materials characterization experiments for students majoring in applied physics.

The centerpiece of the lab is the VersaLab Physical Properties Measurement System donated by Quantum Design. This instrumentation – capable of electrical resistance, heat capacity and magnetic measurements – gives CSUSM undergraduates access to developing hands-on skills and expertise typically reserved for graduate students and working research scientists.

The facility supports instructional laboratory classes and the research activities of the faculty and undergraduate students in the physics department.

These efforts are enhanced by curriculum developed by faculty members of the Quantum Design Education Advisory Council and are provided at the Quantum Design Education website, along with tutorial videos on the Quantum Design YouTube channel. The Quantum Design Education Initiative began as an instructional collaboration between scientists at Quantum Design, CSUSM, San Diego State and UC San Diego to address the need for preparing future generations of materials scientists and engineers.

The grand opening was co-sponsored by Lake Shore Cryotronics, which, along with partners from Quantum Design and qutools, demonstrated its academic instruments to train physics and engineering students in magnetic and low-level electrical measurements and quantum information science phenomena.

“On our campus, we talk a lot about social mobility,” said Stephen Tsui, a CSUSM physics professor and the principal investigator for the Quantum Design Teaching & Materials Discovery Laboratory.

“Over half of our undergraduates are the first in their family to go to college, and they are exploring physics with an instrument that most physics majors don’t see unless they’re in graduate school. This access makes them competitive at getting into those graduate programs and at pursuing local careers in materials research and research instrumentation. We are incredibly grateful to Quantum Design for their partnership and their belief in our mission.”

Photos from the event can be found here.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The CSUSM team of Thomas Handzel, Miguel Lopez, Fares Alhabardi and Alin Hanna competed in the event that’s hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy and took place May 7-9 in Washington, D.C. They are a multidisciplinary group of upperclassmen majoring in electrical engineering, software engineering, physics and business.

Their faculty mentor is Hamed Nademi, an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Nademi has been working on wave energy converter applications since 2020 and has built the Marine Energy team at CSUSM. He runs a Sustainable and Interactive Technologies & Energy (SITE) lab focusing on renewable energy integration, microgrids, transportation electrification and marine power grids.

The same student quartet also was selected as one of 20 teams nationwide in the 2024 MECC. They are among only three groups from California State University.

The CSUSM team focuses on exploring the feasibility of supplying power from wave energy to the Poseidon desalination plant in Carlsbad. Using a prototype made with a 3D printer, the students conducted tests in the kinesiology department’s surf pool, which has the capability to generate wave profiles with various speeds. The experiments allowed the team to ascertain the functional behavior of the wave energy converter to refine the design variables, values and dimensions. 

The team’s next step is to build a metal-based prototype with a generator and power electronics converters to generate DC and/or AC power for non-grid or grid-connected applications. It will receive a $20,000 grant from the Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory for the 2024 competition.

The team also includes three senior students (Miguel Molina, Jessi Angeles and Victor Gomez) who are part of the first cohort to graduate from CSUSM's electrical engineering program. They have been working on hardware development of a power electronics converter to provide electricity from ocean waves compatible with a wall power outlet.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Perron is the principal investigator for a three-year, $2,534,399 grant titled “QIST in the CSU: Expanding Access to Quantum Information Science and Technology.” The award is through the Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) program in the Department of Energy.

The emerging field of QIST aims to harness the power of quantum mechanics and usher in a radical new era of technology.

“Since the mid-20^th century, we’ve had technologies that are enabled by our understanding of quantum mechanics – things like lasers and the transistor – which have revolutionized our economy and general way of life,” Perron said. “However, although enabled by our understanding of quantum mechanics, these technologies don’t generally use or rely on the more ‘weird’ aspects of the theory, things like entanglement or quantum measurement. We’re at a point now where we can engineer quantum systems well enough that we can control these aspects and potentially use them for practical applications.”

Proposed applications, Perron said, include such things as simulations, data encryption and information security – important components of U.S. scientific leadership, national security and economic competitiveness.

Perron worked on the grant proposal with fellow CSUSM physics professor Ed Price as well as representatives from the CSU Office of the Chancellor, Chico State and multiple external entities. The grant started this February and will continue through February 2026.  

The grant project will utilize a two-pronged approach to broadening participation in the QIST field. The first is to focus on providing student opportunities and support. The planned methodologies are bridge programs to expose incoming undergraduate students to QIST and ensure that they have the math skills necessary to succeed in their college majors; cohort-based student learning communities that will provide professional development and community support to students interested in QIST; and summer internships through Sandia National Laboratories that will offer QIST research experiences that are rare at the undergraduate level because of the cost and complexity of QIST systems.

The bridge programs and student learning communities will take place at CSUSM and Chico State, and will be coordinated with the help of Growth Sector, a Bay Area nonprofit that seeks to expand access to STEM degrees and careers.

The second prong is to focus on faculty activities that will expand the capacity within the CSU system to offer QIST educational experiences. This will be accomplished through two annual summer workshops at CSUSM to train CSU faculty on QIST concepts and educational modules as well as faculty online learning communities (FOLCs) during the academic year to ensure that faculty persist in their implementation of QIST education.

STEM-NET, the CSU multicampus consortia at the Office of the Chancellor, will disseminate the tools developed through these activities and increase adoption of QIST curriculum across the entire system.

“I hope that the long-term impact of this project will be a strong QIST education community in the CSU that provides sustainable pathways for students to join the field,” Perron said. “I hope the result is that CSU students in STEM fields will be aware of what QIST is and have opportunities both in and out of the classroom to learn more about it, should they want to.”

The QIST project is an outgrowth of a different grant that Perron received more than two years ago – as part of a group with CSUSM physics professor Charles De Leone and math professor Shahed Sharif – from the American Physical Society Innovation Fund. Through that grant, the faculty trio hosted a workshop that aimed to identify the difficulties associated with incorporating QIST into the curriculum of predominantly undergraduate institutions.

“From discussions and follow-up activities associated with that, it became clear to me that there are a lot of like-minded faculty who would love to bring QIST to their students but are running into certain challenges,” Perron said. “This grant provides a lot of resources to overcome many of these barriers. The nature of QIST has so far limited most opportunities for undergraduates to engage with QIST to large research-focused institutions. I think this award will go a long way toward addressing that access issue and build capacity in undergraduate-focused institutions to bring this field to their students.”

Caroline Caplan, a cosmochemist and Sara Belontz, an environmental geoscientist, are researching complex issues relevant to everyday lives, in terms of evolution and sustainability. In addition to pursuing challenging postdoc research in the Department of Physics at Cal State San Marcos, on a daily basis, they utilize this research to also advocate for a much bigger cause; underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  

According to California State University Dashboards, of those enrolled in the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSTEM) at CSUSM during fall 2022, 42% were female, which is the lowest total percentage of female students since 2011. Within the applied physics major, only 22% of students enrolled during the fall of 2022 were female.  

In “STEM Jobs See Uneven Progress in Increasing Gender, Racial and Ethnic Diversity,” Pew Research said, “The long-term outlook for diversity in the STEM workforce is closely tied to representation in the STEM educational system, particularly across the nation’s colleges and universities.” 

While Caplan and Belontz feel immensely supported by faculty in the Department of Physics at CSUSM, they recount experiences they’ve shared within the field where this wasn’t always the case. 

“Being a woman in this field, especially in the realm of astronomy and physics, is partly empowering because I’m proud that I’ve proved I could make it,” Caplan said. “But on this other side, I often think ‘where is everybody else?’ Physics is cool, so where are all the other ladies? Where’s the other representation?” 

Caplan has found it challenging to respect her own boundaries after feeling like she must work much harder to prove she’s equivalent to expectations and be seen as enough. Situations like these have caused both Caplan and Belontz to feel isolated and fostered imposter syndrome. 

Belontz has been to a handful of talks and conferences where she was the only woman presenting her research and while she advocated for women in this space, these conversations took away from her work and achievements.  

“I try my best to change the narrative so that [women in STEM] aren’t seen as a disadvantage,” Belontz said. “I believe that women are meant to speak up and to take up space in any kind of discipline. Things are slowly starting to become more inclusive and it’s primarily because of women who are championing for other women to succeed.”  

Belontz and Caplan are in fact changing this narrative, in addition to the stereotypical narrative often portrayed in media sources, where women are pitted against one another. The two share an office space, are constantly working in one another’s labs, providing encouragement and advocating for one another. Together, they radiate infectious energy and are the epitome of female empowerment. 

They also have a shared vision of using academia to uplift and support young girls, who are excited about science. 

Caplan demonstrates this while participating in the NASA “Aerospace Academy” a program which supports local high school students, many from low-income backgrounds and engages them with scientific activities. It is through this program that she actually found her passion for academia, as she develops much of the curriculum and meets with the student ambassadors on a weekly basis.  

This conversational component of their daily work is paired with research advancements, in their vastly different laboratories: 

For Caplan’s postdoc, she is working to understand water on the moon and oxygen isotope exchange in the early solar system, which will provide a better understanding of how the earth came to be as it is now.  

Caplan always wanted to “touch outer space.” Now a core memory, a fifth-grade activity would shape the trajectory of her future; She clasped a handful of “star” glitter, threw it up, and watched in awe as it landed on a dark, black sheet of paper. She then created her own constellation from the unique way the glitter fell and gave her creation its origin story.  

Little did she know at 10 years old that her career would be comprised of a very similar activity; discovering how materials on Earth that originated from outer space, meteorites, may have shaped how the solar system evolved. 

Today, Caplan continues to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system by conducting experiments in the Isotope Characterization Experiment (ICE) lab. Her research focuses on how energetic fluxes in the solar system change the isotopic composition of ice and dust grains, such as those on the moon. These experiments run at ultra-high vacuum and use a beam of electrons to break the bonds of water ice and a substrate to promote the exchange of isotopes. This exchange of isotopes can give insight into processes that occurred during the formation of the solar system and help explain why planetary bodies are so unique.  

The entirety of this process helps scientists see possibilities of what may have happened in the early solar system. Earth and all the materials in the solar system were formed from the same dust cloud as the Sun, so they should have the same composition, yet so many materials look different. The answers to why this happened could give insight into planetary evolution. 

Belontz on the other hand, has developed a methodology to quantify nanoplastic particles in bottled water samples using an Atomic Force Microscopy based-Infrared Spectroscopy (AFM-IR) technique.  

 “[The impact of nanoplastic particles on] humans are still relatively unknown. This is because the quantification and assessment of sub-micron particles is lacking, likely due to the difficulty of detecting them using conventional microscopy and spectroscopy methods. One could assume that with a high surface-to-volume ratio, the potential toxicological effects of nanoplastic particles [being able to cross biological barriers] would be great.”  

 Her technique utilizes microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to chemically map and identify nanoplastics in drinking water. Once particles are detected, counted and measured, she can determine the concentrations and mass of nanoplastics in a 500 mL bottle of water.  

 “Nanoplastics can be released into bottled water for a number of reasons, including  

• The opening and closing cycles of the bottle cap; the abrasion of the harder high density polyethylene cap (HDPE) with the softer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle can increase fragmentation and release particles into the water.  
• If the condition of the plastic bottle is altered by the user or by external stressors, for example, when pressurized water is added to the bottle during production, or if one were to leave it in a hot car for a long period of time, this could not only increase degradation but it could also expose humans to chemical leachates like bisphenol A (BPA).”    

“Interestingly, even though literature on this topic is significant, especially on how ubiquitous microplastics are in the environment and their interaction with aquatic and terrestrial organisms. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared that because ‘no clear conclusions’ have been made about their toxic effect on people, micro- and nanoplastics are not a problem of concern.” said Belontz 

Belontz is hoping that her research will be a steppingstone for future work on ecotoxicology studies or studies examining the characteristics of environmentally relevant nanoplastics and how they’re transported in the natural environment. She is currently writing a manuscript which, if published, would support these findings.  

Belontz has had to combat many obstacles in order to construct this type of research and methodology. As a Canadian resident and the first international postdoc student at CSUSM, she had to jump through several hoops before she was even able to physically begin her postdoc research.  

“I was the first member of my family to go to university. [Then I took that a step further by] earning a master's degree, then a Ph.D. at the age of only 28,” Belontz said. “It was a huge leap for me to drive all the way to California from Canada, not having any connections, not knowing where I was going to live and not even knowing much about the United States. I did this all just based on passion.” 

It’s clear that sometimes, passion paired with hard work is enough to make a difference. Belontz and Caplan’s resiliency, intelligence and passion proves to be a powerhouse for CSTEM and CSUSM. Their research and outlook are making strides for the advancement of physics and women in STEM.   

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics encourages students to seek out and attend conferences, locally and nationally, so that they can present their research findings. This is especially a goal of the Physics Department because these types of conferences allow undergraduate students to network with industry professionals, gain exposure in their discipline, and gain confidence and leadership traits; all skills and experiences that will help students be successful academically and post-graduation.

Corey found that to be true, as she was able to meet other passionate physicists and had the opportunity to network with well-respected individuals in the physics community during the two-day conference.

For “Characterizing Gate Defined Quantum Dots in a Mesa-Etched Silicon Nanowire,” Corey began working with Justin Perron, a physics associate professor and condensed matter researcher at CSUSM. Corey's research work this fall is funded by Hologic. As a Hologic Scholar, Corey is part of a pilot program that is helping her continue her Summer Scholar research into the academic year. Corey’s project included making single electron transport measurements and investigating gate-defined silicon quantum dots.

During summer 2022, Corey prepared and began measuring a device that was designed to operate as a double quantum dot, which is intended to isolate individual electrons into two separate but coupled regions. Quantum dot devices like these are versatile platforms for studying solid-state physics, nanotechnology and quantum computing.

While characterizing the device’s behavior, Corey discovered that although the data initially appeared consistent with double quantum dot behavior, quantitatively, there was a significant disagreement with theory.

“We proposed that there was an unintentional quantum dot in the device, making it a triple quantum dot,” Perron said. “Corey showed how this triple quantum dot model was consistent with the data she had collected and proposed additional measurements be made which could confirm the interpretation of their observation.”

The primary disagreement was a blockade of current through the device for applied voltages that should have allowed current in the double quantum dot model.

“As the name indicates, a triple quantum dot is similar to a double quantum dot but with electrons isolated into three separate regions,” Perron said. “In this model, it is possible that the presence of the third region and the electric fields from the electrons isolated there could block current.”

Corey and Perron then compared the predictions of this model with their observations and realized they were consistent. Corey proposed further measurements that could test and confirm this hypothesis. Her measurements and proposed follow-up were what earned her the recognition for best undergraduate research at the American Physics Society Far West Section’s Annual Meeting.

“As a passionate physicist and researcher, winning the Steven Chu award for best research conducted by an undergraduate student is surreal,” Corey said. “I feel so honored, and it only motivated me to continue working hard.

“I'm the first in my family to pursue college and anything STEM related, so winning the award just felt like a confirmation that I'm heading in the right direction.”

Corey and Perron are now working toward measuring a similar device to the one described above and implementing an additional measurement technique that will increase the properties they can probe to further their investigation.

Corey is wrapping up her last semester at CSUSM and will be graduating this fall with her degree in applied physics. Her career goal is to obtain a Ph.D. in physics and to one day run her own research lab as a condensed matter experimentalist.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The grant establishes Dominguez as a member of the science team for the NASA mission OSIRIS-REx, which stands for the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer. OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. spacecraft to collect a sample from an asteroid. It is on its way back to Earth to deliver samples it gathered from the asteroid Bennu in 2020; the samples will arrive on Earth in about a year.

Dominguez’s role on the science team will be to analyze samples from Bennu by employing a cutting-edge technique that he has pioneered called nano infrared spectroscopy (or nanoIR) in which he uses the tip of an atomic force microscope, in combination with infrared light, to identify and characterize nanoparticles – those that are smaller than a micron.

Dominguez honed this technique as a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego before he joined the CSUSM faculty in 2011. He said he’s the only one of dozens of OSIRIS-REx science team members who utilizes the nanoIR technique, and that his lab is the only one in the country that possesses such capabilities.

“It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Dominguez said. “It will be very cool to look at these samples and contribute to this creation of knowledge about some of the most primitive objects in the solar system, the building blocks of the planets. I was telling my wife the other day that it feels like being selected for the space program, except without all the danger.”

Dominguez is receiving the NASA grant at the same time he is also being published as a co-author of a Sept. 22 article in Science magazine about measurements of samples from a different asteroid, Ryugu, as part of the Hayabusa2 sample return mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Dominguez was a member of the team that measured samples at CSUSM and interpreted them over the past year.

The Science article reports that an analysis of 17 samples from Ryugu indicate that its parent asteroid formed in the outer solar system about two million years after the beginning of solar system formation.

“I expect to find lots of similar things with Bennu to what we've found with Ryugu,” Dominguez said. “But there will always be surprises.”

Dominguez said the first year of the grant will involve laying the groundwork for the sample analysis, including practice rounds. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to return on Sept. 24, 2023, and after that NASA will send a tiny amount of Bennu material to Dominguez, who will spend the latter two years of the grant analyzing it.

Dominguez said the goal of his project is to augment the remote observations of Bennu already made by scientists with detailed measurements produced by advanced lab instruments. Using nanoIR to map the minerals and organics present on the asteroid could help Dominguez and the rest of the team better understand the origins of the planets and the molecular seeds to life.

“These samples are arguably the most primitive. We think they're basically what the building blocks of the planets look like,” he said. “Stepping back 4.5 billion years, interstellar dust grains got snowballed into these parent bodies. Well, this is what we think the parent bodies look like. We think the ingredients for life or the precursors to life probably came from objects like these. And we want to understand their history between the time that they were interstellar dust grains to this stage in their evolution.

“We see the planets, but they probably haven’t always looked this way. So how do we find out what the building blocks of the planets look like? This allows us to go back in time because these samples in many ways have been cryogenically preserved. It’s an enormous opportunity, and I’m very excited about it.”

Price also believes that kind of knowledge should be available to everyone, not just people – like him – who were fortunate enough to attend elite academic institutions. And he has dedicated a significant portion of his career to increasing access to scientific education.

Now, the Cal State San Marcos physics professor has received not one, but two grants that will further this longstanding effort.

The first is a five-year, $1.49 million grant from the National Science Foundation that will extend and expand CSUSM’s Mobile Making program, through which undergraduates in STEM majors are dispatched to local middle schools to deliver science lessons to mostly underrepresented students.

The second is a three-year, $480,000 grant from NASA to create an “aerospace academy” for local high school students, many of them from low-income backgrounds.

Both programs will operate through the Center for Research and Engagement in STEM Education (CRESE), for which Price is the faculty director and co-founder.

“Working in our community and working with students to whom these opportunities historically have been denied, that’s something that’s really important to me,” Price said. “And one of the things I love about being here at Cal State San Marcos is that we’re in a great position to do something about that.”

The NSF grant builds on a similar one that CSUSM received five years ago that established CRESE and the Mobile Making program. The new grant continues the practice of sending so-called STEM ambassadors into local schools to lead science experiments and other projects during after-school periods. But the additional funding will allow CSUSM to more than double (to about 30) the number of middle schools and upper elementary grades that it reaches, including in more remote school districts like Oceanside, Fallbrook and Bonsall.

As part of the grant to CSUSM, the NSF also awarded money to start up Mobile Making programs at three other California State University campuses – Fresno, Long Beach and San Luis Obispo – and Price and his team will assist with the launching of those initiatives this fall and spring. And the CSU Chancellor’s Office will help disseminate the results as a means of encouraging other campuses to adopt the program as well.

“We've learned a lot about how to make this work, and I think we have a good model,” Price said. “It's proven to the point that it does make sense for other places to try it. The things that make it work here, like the power of our campus as a regional institution, that's true of a lot of CSUs, and I think that there's no reason that this wouldn't work in other places.”

A co-principal investigator for the grant is Sinem Siyahhan, a professor in the School of Education. For many years, Siyahhan has run a program in which undergraduate students planning to pursue a teaching credential fan out to after-school sessions to organize activities with kids. During the pandemic, Siyahhan and Price merged their programs, and now the STEM ambassadors are accompanied on their outings by future teachers. In all, hundreds of CSUSM students will participate in the Mobile Making program during each of the next five years.

The NASA grant was secured by Price in collaboration with Gerardo Dominguez, a fellow physics professor. CSUSM was one of only eight institutions nationwide that received a total of $3.8 million in Minority University Research and Education (MUREP) awards for the MUREP Aerospace Academy (MAA).

CSUSM’s version of this academy involves a partnership with four area high schools: San Marcos and Mission Hills in San Marcos and San Pasqual and Orange Glen in Escondido. For each of the next three years, a group of STEM majors from CSUSM will work with about 25 students from each of the sites (about 100 total) on a year-long set of activities around a common theme. The experience will culminate in a summer capstone project in which NASA will present students with a challenge problem that they will have to develop a solution for.

The theme for this school year is lunar exploration.

“There will be a whole bunch of things we'll do to think about how you design a vehicle that can travel on a lunar surface,” Price said. “What goes into that? What's some of the science that we know about the moon and about the kind of terrain and conditions you'd find there, and how do you take that into account?

“The idea of an academy is a multifaceted and a long-term experience for these kids. A lot of times kids will have opportunities to do one-off things, and that can be great. But I think something that's sustained like this over time is going to be a meaningful experience for these students.”

Price and Dominguez have several partners on the MAA program, including CSUSM’s National Latino Research Center to work with families of the high school students on college readiness, Carlsbad-based Nordson, Palomar College and a NASA-funded research collaboration called ICE Five-O (of which Dominguez is a member).

“The approach we take at CRESE is really about leveraging the strengths of our students, our relationships with the community, building off of that,” Price said. “That's the theme in both of these programs. They're both about giving our youth in the community a chance to engage in science and have early and successful experiences with that.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The first American woman and youngest American in space, Ride made her journey into history on June 18, 1983 as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Challenger STS-7.

About 25 years later, she inspired a fourth-grade girl from Escondido to pursue some science dreams of her own.

“I have always been interested in learning about physical science,” said Cal State San Marcos physics senior Daria Bonds. “I met Dr. Sally K. Ride at the San Diego Air and Space Museum when I was in fourth grade. Seeing her talk about being a physicist, an astronaut and steward of the environment was inspirational.”

That chance meeting, which came a few years before Ride died following a brief battle with pancreatic cancer, started Bonds on a science path that has led her to becoming CSUSM’s current Society of Physics Students (SPS) president.

A graduate of Escondido High School, Bonds chose CSUSM for two reasons: the welcoming physics department and the supportive cross country and track coaches.

As if being a physics major and campus leader didn’t keep her busy enough, Bonds is a runner on the cross country team. While continuing to improve her personal bests each season, she earned CCAA All-Academic honors in 2019 and ’20 and captured the Big Blue Award three times – fall 2019, spring 2020 and again in fall 2020.

“I enjoy running and working out to maintain a mind and body balance,” said Bonds, who joined the cross country team at the same time as her brother David, who is a CSUSM junior majoring in software engineering. “I appreciate the leadership course that my coach Torrey Olson created to support student athletes developing leadership skills and positive team culture.” 

Gerardo Dominguez is an associate professor of physics at CSUSM. He has worked extensively with Bonds as she is one of just two undergraduate students working in his lab this year. He is not alone in his reaction to Bonds being a collegiate athlete while studying physics. The science/running combination literally runs in the family as her other younger brother is planning on studying STEM at CSUSM next year and running cross country as well.

Coincidentally, before Ride became a trailblazer in so many ways, she was a top juniors tennis player, even dropping out of college briefly to pursue a tennis career before returning to Stanford to earn two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree and a Ph.D.

“It is impressive for any student to maintain the GPA that Daria has achieved as a physics major,” Dominguez said. “To do so while being a Division II athlete is very impressive in my opinion. Daria does her homework, comes prepared to meetings and pays attention to the details of her work. She asks great questions, asks for help when she needs it and communicates well. She is mature and committed and a joy to work with.”

To prepare for her senior year and beyond, Bonds participated in a summer research program at Caltech.

Her research project concerned the study of outflows of material from the disks of galaxies, analyzing sophisticated computer simulations of galaxy evolution to determine the direction of those outflows within the composition and structure of the CGM halo regions.

“I had a wonderful time at CalTech (last) summer being surrounded by driven scientists and kind people,” said Bonds, who will also graduate with a minor in math. “I learned so much about my field of interest – astronomy and astrophysics. I made memories with other undergrad students exploring the L.A. area and memories with my lab group analyzing new data.”

In the spring, Bonds plans on bringing back Rocket Car Races with the SPS chapter. After the difficulties of being isolated during the pandemic, she is proud of the study and socialization opportunities she has helped create so far this school year.

She is also the president of the Women in Physics organization on campus. It’s easy to see her future is headed toward making a positive impact on the world.

Much like the hero she met in fourth grade.

“I want to be an advocate for science education and encourage other students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue studies in STEM,” Bonds said. “I’m looking forward to competing during the spring track season. I also plan to continue to run on my own time after I’ve graduated.”

For now, that means pursuing a Ph.D. program in astrophysics to do computational and theoretical astronomy research.

“I’m really happy for her to come out of being an undergrad and understanding what Ph.D. level research at a top R1 institution entails,” Dominguez said. “Beyond that, I think Daria will chart her course, do the homework and be successful. I’m excited to see how she develops as a scholar and I look forward to seeing her publish her first authored papers in a few years, maybe even sooner. Honestly, I find her inspirational.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Honorees were nominated by faculty or staff and endorsed by their college’s dean. Here is a closer look at each award recipient:

Kodie Gerritsen, visual and performing arts and physics

President's Outstanding Graduate

Dean’s Award, College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences

Gerritsen is a double major who was lauded for their avid curiosity and adventurous scholarship.

Nominating professor Lucy HG Solomon noted that Gerritsen is not only an outstanding student, but a talented artist and a curious scientist who is engaged with the community. Since 2017, Solomon has worked closely with Gerritsen on digital art projects that tie into the environment and social justice and on interdisciplinary endeavors that combine art and science.

Among Gerritsen’s accomplishments are the work they did with Solomon on an interactive art piece called “Degenerative Cultures” that uses living organisms and artificial intelligence to comment on social networks. Gerritsen also worked on the Jaguar Umbrella Project, which included kits for schoolchildren to explain the importance of jaguars as umbrella species in the Amazon rainforest.

Gerritsen was a STEAM ambassador who designed and delivered curriculum on art and science to K-12 students, bringing craft, sculpture, color theory and the science of rainbows together in an engaging hands-on activity.

Learn more about Gerritsen’s achievements here.

Christine Briggs, literature and writing studies

Dean’s Award, Office of Graduate Studies and Research

Briggs stood out for her outstanding record of achievement in the literature and writing studies master’s program, which included presenting award-winning original research, serving as an exemplary teaching associate and addressing timely issues in the original research for her master’s thesis.

Rebecca Lush, who served as research director of Briggs’ thesis and taught her in two advanced-level courses, noted that Briggs has shown the makings of a promising research career during her time in the master’s program, and the work she produced is suitable for consideration for peer-review publication.

Briggs presented her original literary research at major national conferences and was awarded the “Best Essay” prize by the Margaret Atwood Society in 2018 for her research on the novel “Cat’s Eye,” a project that started her graduate-level work in feminist literary studies and paved the way for the methodological concerns and practices that she used in what eventually became her culminating thesis.

Sofia Davis, Master of Public Health

Dean’s Award, College of Education, Health and Human Services

Davis had a stellar academic career while also supporting friends, family and community members during the pandemic.

After earning her bachelor’s in global health from UC San Diego, Davis maintained a 4.0 grade-point average while being consistently lauded by her instructors at CSUSM.

Davis has worked as a volunteer contact tracer for the CSUSM COVID Management Team, which helps infected individuals understand the virus and care options. Her efforts help keep the campus community safe while minimizing the risk of virus transmission.

Davis also works with different agencies to help provide services and coordinate care. She has been an intern at Palomar Medical Center for seven years, including nearly four years as part of the internship’s leadership team. She has also served as a medical scribe at a family medicine clinic in Escondido, ensuring that patient needs are documented accurately as they go through care and treatment.

Davis plans to attend medical school to become a primary care pediatrician.

Zsuzsanna Dianovics, computer science and information systems

Dean’s Award, College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Dianovics was honored for her exceptional academic record, undergraduate research experience, impressive leadership achievements and significant participation in community outreach.

Dianovics excelled in two computer science courses taught by professor Nahid Majd, which led Majd to encourage Dianovics to apply to the 2020 Summer Scholars research program. Dianovics was accepted into the program and worked on a research project on blockchain technology, an emerging technology in cybersecurity. She presented her research at both the Summer Scholar showcase last August and the CSUSM undergraduate research showcase in December.

Dianovics also prepared a scholarly manuscript based on the research she did in the summer program and submitted it to the 2021 Computer Science Conference for CSU Undergraduates hosted by CSU Monterey Bay. The paper was accepted, and she presented her research at the conference in March.

Dianovics plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science.

Christian Galvis, global supply chain management

Dean’s Award, College of Business Administration

Galvis excelled both academically and through his numerous service accomplishments.

A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Galvis credits his military experience for helping to hone his values of commitment, perseverance, self-worth and volunteering.

Those values were at the forefront of his time at CSUSM. In his first semester, Galvis helped revive the Student Veterans Organization after a two-year absence. Galvis also served as president of the Global Supply Chain Management Society for the past year, keeping members engaged virtually throughout the pandemic. He also helped spearhead CoBA’s first virtual career fair and a second successful event this spring.

Galvis collaborated with other student organizations to develop best practices on retaining members during the virtual environment, and he served as a resource for other student society presidents who are new to their positions.

Galvis has accepted a position at global communications company Viasat as a procurements specialist upon graduation.

Gladys Guzman Guizar, sociology and criminology and justice studies

Dean’s Award, Dean of Students

Guzman Guizar excelled academically while also making lasting contributions to student life at CSUSM.

Guzman Guizar has been dedicated to social justice initiatives, including the DREAMer Resource Office and the creation of the HUMAN Club. She is also an active member of University Without Borders, playing a key role in providing support to students from diverse backgrounds and ensuring that CSUSM provides a diverse, equitable and inclusive space where all students can be comfortable and successful. Her contributions to diversity and inclusiveness were recognized last fall as a 2020 recipient of the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity.

Guzman Guizar has worked to help students develop a sense of belonging on campus through her roles as a peer adviser for the Office of Academic Advising and a student assistant at the DREAMer Resource Office.

Guzman Guizar plans to attend law school to pursue immigration law so she can help the undocumented community.

Read more about Guzman Guizar here.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The plan that earned a trio of Cal State San Marcos professors a recent grant was born in an unusual place: a hallway conversation three years ago.

Physics professors Justin Perron and Charles De Leone and math professor Shahed Sharif learned in December that they were one of three groups to earn a grant from the American Physical Society Innovation Fund.

Their project, “Bringing Quantum Information Science to Diverse Undergraduate Populations,” is for two years for approximately $82,000. It aims to bring together faculty in the California State University system and other primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) to study the state of undergraduate Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST) education, identify the challenges associated with implementing QIST curriculum at said institutions, and develop strategies to deal with these challenges.

And it started with hallway chats.

“After a brief chat with Chuck about something I was doing in my lab he mentioned that Shahed was interested in quantum information science and we should all meet up and chat to see if our interests had any overlap,” Perron said. “That turned into weekly meetings and those discussions led to this effort. It’s great working at CSUSM. I really like the culture we’ve got here. Everyone is supportive and always willing to take the time to chat. This whole thing started with just hallway conversations with colleagues.”

The problem as Perron sees it is that education and workforce training in QIST mostly exists at the graduate and postdoctoral levels, and mostly at large research institutions like Harvard and MIT. If these programs can be brought to smaller institutions with fewer resources – perhaps even at the K-12 level – the impact could be monumental.

The CSU system is ideal for this type of intervention because it serves such a diverse student population.

“Absolutely,” Sharif said. “Underrepresented communities are by definition an untapped resource. There are hundreds of undiscovered diamonds in the rough out there, and the mission of the CSU is to give them the chance to shine.”

For De Leone, it’s about creating a space to include QIST as a significant part of the CSU curriculum. Not just because it provides more opportunities, but for the fact the system’s graduates often go on to the world’s best postgraduate programs or directly to innovative companies.

“We know that our graduates end up everywhere from Harvard to UCSD and Silicon Valley to IBM,” he said. “Therefore, it only makes sense to provide our students with the latest knowledge in the field. So while students in the CSU are on a trajectory to achieve amazing things, they don’t always come from privileged backgrounds. When we prepare curriculum for our students, we need to take that into account.”

Follow-up support for faculty implementing QIST curricula will be provided in the form of online learning communities. Involving the faculty from CSU and other PUIs will ensure the underrepresented populations they serve are included in the development of the QIST workforce, thereby helping create a diverse and demographically representative community from its inception.

Some of the money will go to hosting a workshop to help inform faculty about current efforts in the QIST education and to support faculty as they bring what they learn back to their home institutions.

Groups of about eight faculty members will meet virtually every other week to discuss their efforts. They can discuss any issues they’re having like where in the curriculum to introduce certain topics, or techniques and activities that are effective at conveying certain concepts.

“If we can provide knowledge and support to faculty at these smaller primarily undergraduate institutions we’ll be lowering some of the barriers they face when trying to include QIST in their curriculum,” Perron said. “By providing opportunities to get involved with QIST to the diverse and often underserved communities at these institutions we’ll be bringing those students into the QIST community. Doing this now, when the QIST community is still new and developing, will hopefully help make it more demographically representative from the start and avoid some of the representation issues that exist in so many fields of science.”

That support could have ripple effects into the workforce. According to Perron, the QIST field is expected to have a large impact on the world’s economy. Both government and private sectors have begun focusing on and investing in this space.

Said De Leone: “Our whole current system of encryption is vulnerable to quantum computing. So to keep any secret online will require a good understanding of quantum computing algorithms. Second, there are many problems that would take a very long time, or be essentially impossible to solve with a classical computer that are open to solution with a quantum computer.”

The investments of time, money and energy are expected to lead to large-scale economic growth and countless new opportunities.

The stakes are high, but the possibilities are wide-ranging.

And at CSUSM, it started with small talk in the hallways.

“Justin, Chuck, and I began weekly meetings a couple years ago just so we could chat about quantum computing,” Sharif said. “At the time, we didn’t know a ton about the topic. Our meetings were just an opportunity to get together and have fun learning. This project rose organically out of the rapport we developed in our weekly discussions.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Now, the Cal State San Marcos physics professor will apply his scientific expertise and techniques to the pressing environmental issue of the tiniest materials in our water.

Dominguez has been awarded a two-year, $395,490 grant from the CSU Council on Ocean Affairs, Science and Technology (COAST), which promotes research and education that advance the knowledge of marine and coastal resources and the processes that affect them.

Dominguez is one of only two research teams in the CSU system – the other is from San Diego State – to receive funding that will help California manage microplastics, the small pieces of plastic found ubiquitously in the environment that are of increasing concern due to their potential impacts on wildlife and human health. The money is provided through a new COAST initiative, the State Science Information Needs Program (SSINP), which funds projects that are designed to directly support the state’s needs for scientific information to support decision-making. 

The grant is the first significant award ever given by COAST to a CSUSM faculty member.

“I’m very excited about this one,” Dominguez said. “This is an issue that touches upon our lives as humans, but is also important for marine life. As a citizen and scientist, being in a position to contribute to our understanding of an important public health issue like this is very gratifying. It’s fun to think about problems like the formation of the solar system, but I also get a lot of satisfaction in tackling environmental problems.”

Dominguez’s previous research, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, generally has fallen into two categories. One is a field called isotopic forensics, which is the study of how molecules are made in space and how chemical reactions that occur in space affect their mixtures of isotopes. In this vein, NASA awarded Dominguez a grant of almost $1 million last year to study the origins of water ice on the moon.

The second focus of his work is known as nano infrared spectroscopy (or nanoIR), a cutting-edge technique in which a scientist uses the tip of an atomic force microscope, in combination with infrared light, to identify and characterize nanoparticles – those that are smaller than a micron. Dominguez honed this technique as a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego before he joined the CSUSM faculty in 2011, and he originally applied it to characterize dust grains from a comet.

With the COAST grant, Dominguez will utilize the same nanoIR technique to better understand man-made contamination of water. His project is titled “Micro and NanoPlastic Identification in Aqueous Samples Using Nano-IR,” and its goal is to identify the smallest types of microplastics, called nanoplastics, to get a grasp on how much has accumulated in the oceans and other waterways, and help regulators’ address the risk to both humans and wildlife.

“We know that plastic degrades, especially in the presence of UV light, and we suspect very strongly that there are lots of nanoplastic particles out in the ocean,” Dominguez said. “But we have a lot to learn about nanoplastics in the environment, and one of the big challenges is having techniques that are sensitive enough to see not microscopic, but sub-microscopic pieces of material.”

A substantial portion of the money, Dominguez said, will allow him to hire a postdoctoral scientist to help him develop the protocols for handling water samples. In the first year of the grant, which won’t officially start until January because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, he hopes to prove that nanoplastic particles can be detected, establish a lower limit on size, and determine how efficient the technique is. The second year will be devoted to going out into the field and collecting samples from as many sites as possible.

As part of the grant, Dominguez will be required to meet with officials from the California State Water Resources Control Board and other state agencies to share results and answer questions.

“In many cases, these particles are so fine that they’re not necessarily getting removed from water treatment plants,” Dominguez said. “So this is a big unknown with potentially huge impacts on human health. The state is worried about it, but also incredibly excited about the potential of this research. And I’m excited about it, too.

“Physics has prepared me well for tackling problems across a variety of fields.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) announced that Julia Lewandoski, a Cal State San Marcos assistant professor of history, is the recipient of the SHEAR Dissertation Prize, which is awarded to an exceptional unpublished dissertation pertaining to the history of North America from 1776-1861.

Lewandoski was honored for “Small Victories: Indigenous Proprietors Across Empires in North America, 1763-1891.”

Established in 1977, SHEAR is “an association of scholars dedicated to exploring the events and the meaning of United States history between 1776 and 1861.”

Physics department honored

The physics department is among the recipients of INSIGHT Into Diversity’s 2020 Inspiring Programs in STEM Award, which recognizes unique and innovative efforts for improving access to science, technology, engineering, and math for underrepresented students.

Among the areas highlighted by INSIGHT Into Diversity was the department’s ranking for being sixth in the nation among undergraduate-only programs in awarding physics degrees to students from underrepresented groups.

Professor’s art collective on Lumen longlist

Allochronic Cycles, by the art collective Cesar & Lois with contributions from CSUSM arts, media and design students, is on the longlist for the 2020 Lumen Prize for Artificial Intelligence. CSUSM students engaged in independent studies with professor Lucy HG Solomon, who began Cesar & Lois with Brazilian collaborator Cesar Baio, contributed to the project’s research last spring.

The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 9 with winners announced on Oct. 22.

$1 million grant for chemistry professors

Robert Iafe, an associate professor of chemistry, and Paul Jasien, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, have received a grant of almost $1 million from the National Science Foundation that will support the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students in chemistry and biochemistry.

Rankings

• CSUSM is 22^nd on Money’s list of “Most Transformative Colleges” and 202^nd out of more than 700 schools on Money’s list of “Best Colleges in America, Ranked by Value.”
• The university ranks 27^th in the Great Value Colleges list of the “Top 30 U.S. Colleges That Are Excelling in Community Outreach.”
• CSUSM is ranked 97^th in the country and seventh in California by LendEDU for having one of the lowest student loan debt figures for the Class of 2019.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Honorees were nominated by faculty or staff and endorsed by their college’s dean. Here is a closer look at each award recipient:

Lauren Tafla, applied physics

President's Outstanding Graduate

Dean’s Award, College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Tafla has demonstrated excellence academically and through her research experiences, including her selection as a Summer Scholar in 2018. An enthusiastic learner with an impeccable work ethic, Tafla quickly mastered the experiments in CSUSM’s Astrophysics and Isotope Geochemistry Lab.

Tafla also has impressed with her leadership skills and deep commitment to sustainability, diversity and inclusion. As a member and president of the campus’ Sustainability Club, Tafla represented student interests on the smoke- and tobacco-free campus task force. She wrote letters to congressional representatives about needed environmental policy changes related to climate change and organized a “sustainable speaker series” to host documentary screenings and speakers.

Among her many accomplishments, Tafla has served as president of the Society of Physics Students, worked as a program facilitator for the San Diego-based nonprofit Treobytes and helped start a Women in Physics group at CSUSM.

Read more about Tafla here.

Margaret Morumbasi, special education credential

Dean’s Award, College of Education, Health and Human Services

In a competitive field of CEHHS candidates that included undergraduate, credential, graduate and doctoral students, Morumbasi stood out for her combination of academic excellence, service and leadership.

Drawing on her personal experiences in Kenya, Morumbasi has participated in numerous regional and national initiatives in support of individuals with disabilities in her country. Her work has contributed to the national discourse on disability awareness in Kenya.

Morumbasi is working full-time as a special educator while simultaneously completing her credential coursework at CSUSM. She has maintained a 3.9 grade-point average and has been invaluable in sharing her knowledge gleaned through her international research on disability awareness.

Nasdira Romero Saravia, child and adolescent development

Dean’s Award, College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences

An active researcher and community activist, Romero Saravia overcame numerous challenges to earn her bachelor’s last December. Romero Saravia persisted despite contending with challenges that included domestic violence, homelessness and being the single parent of a child with special needs. She made the dean’s list every semester at CSUSM and obtained a coveted research position in the psychology department.

Having her own child with special needs turned her interest toward a degree in child and adolescent development, and she has performed valuable work as a research assistant in a cultural perinatal mental health study.

The first in her family to graduate from high school and pursue a college education, Romero Saravia is applying to Ph.D. programs in health policy.

Erika Venegas, marketing

Dean’s Award, College of Business Administration

Venegas has achieved an overall grade-point average of 3.75 and has made the dean’s list every semester since arriving at CSUSM in 2016.

As president of the Latino Business Student Association (LBSA), Venegas expanded the organization’s reach beyond the business discipline to bring professional development opportunities to students of all majors throughout the university. Venegas has made it a priority to reach out across campus to collaborate with the Career Center and the Latin@ Center to extend the impact of LBSA beyond CoBA.

Venegas’ achievements also include founding Lean In CSUSM, a women’s empowerment program offered by the Gender Equity Center; volunteering at CoBA’s Senior Experience Trade Show two straight years; and leading CoBA’s student organization retreat.

Jessica Atencio, kinesiology

Dean’s Award, Graduate Studies

Atencio has excelled academically (she will graduate with a 3.95 grade-point average) and in her research endeavors.

As part of her master’s program requirements, Atencio did her thesis based on her research investigating fluid balance during aquatic exercise. Atencio collected data locally and in Costa Rica on more than 300 research subjects, and she has presented her research at multiple regional and national conferences.

Atencio will continue her education this fall at the University of Oregon, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in human physiology.

Read more about Atencio here.

Ashley Persson, political science

Dean of Students Outstanding Leadership Award

Persson has made lasting contributions to student life at CSUSM through her involvement with Fraternity & Sorority Life and Residential Education.

With an unwavering commitment to excellence in leadership, Persson has held roles that include serving as Order of Omega Chi Lambda chapter president, Delta Zeta Pi Psi chapter global ambassador (former chapter president), and a senior resident adviser in Housing and Residential Education.

Persson has excelled in myriad other ways, including through officer roles with Delta Zeta, earning Order of Omega Honor and Leadership Society, Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society and dean’s list recognition for several semesters. A cancer survivor, Persson also volunteers with the National Children’s Cancer Society.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The University of Colorado-Boulder and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are the other recipients. The winners will be recognized during the Education & Diversity Reception at APS’s April meeting in Washington, D.C.

“We are incredibly honored to receive this award that recognizes not only the efforts of our faculty and staff but also those of our undergraduate students, who are very much our collaborators in the learning process,” said Stephen Tsui, CSUSM’s physics department chair.

The award is part of the APS Committee on Education’s work to recognize departments for excellence in undergraduate physics education and support best practices in education at the undergraduate level.

The Department of Physics primarily taught service courses at CSUSM until fall 2007, when a bachelor’s degree in applied physics was launched. The first physics majors graduated in spring 2009.

Over the past decade, the department has enjoyed tremendous growth, with 116 declared physics majors and 20 baccalaureate graduates last spring. The department has been recognized for serving students from traditionally underrepresented minority (URM) groups, ranking sixth in the nation by the APS Education & Diversity Program in awarding URM undergraduate physics degrees.

“Our department began with only a handful of people just over a decade ago and has since grown into a robust, diverse community of scholars in which the students work alongside the faculty in their research laboratories, participate in research-based instructional activities in the classroom, and engage with the K-12 community through physics outreach,” Tsui said.

Rankings

• CSUSM is 36th nationally out of almost 1,500 schools in CollegeNET’s sixth annual Social Mobility Index, which measures the extent to which a college or university educates more economically disadvantaged students (with family incomes below the national median) at lower tuition and graduates them into good-paying jobs.
• CSUSM is 34^th on Money magazine’s list of “Most Transformative Colleges,” which ranks schools based on the publication’s exclusive value-added scores for graduation rates, earnings and student loan repayment.
• CSUSM is ranked 75^th nationally for producing bachelor’s degrees for underrepresented minorities in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education’s list of “Top 100 Producers of Bachelor’s Degrees, 2019.” The university also ranked 51^st for graduates who identify as Hispanic.
• The university is ranked 19^th in Great Value Colleges’ list of the “Top 35 Most Affordable Bachelor’s Degrees in Anthropology for 2020.”
• CSUSM is 22^nd in California and 44^th in the West in Nursing Schools Almanac’s 2019 rankings of the best U.S. nursing schools.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Not much has changed.

“I still think I’m making the NHL,” Perron quipped.

Perron is still wearing his ice skates, too.

While his days are spent at Cal State San Marcos teaching the next generation of scientists and conducting research in his physics lab, Perron joins other weekend warriors at Ice-Plex Escondido for weekly games in an adult ice hockey league.

Perron grew up outside of Toronto playing hockey with his brother and other older kids – “I was the youngest one, so I got beat up and told to play goalie,” he says – before graduating to highly competitive junior ice hockey leagues as a teenager.

Perron’s prowess on the ice earned him a spot playing for Oswego State University of New York, where he earned his bachelor’s in physics and mathematics.

Perron’s first year at Oswego remains his fondest hockey memory. The team enjoyed an outstanding playoff run and advanced to the NCAA Division III Frozen Four, which refers to the final four teams playing for the national championship. Oswego beat Middlebury College in the semifinals before falling to Norwich University in the championship.

“The whole experience was just awesome,” Perron said.

Perron could have given professional hockey a try in one of the smaller leagues – and many of the people he played with joined leagues in Europe and North America – but he knew toward the end of his senior year at Oswego that he was ready to focus on his interest in physics.

“I don’t have any big regrets,” he said. “I think it would have been fun to try playing professionally, but it probably would have derailed a lot of other things I did.”

Perron earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University at Buffalo in 2012, followed by a three-year postdoctoral position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. Perron was certainly able to get his fill of hockey during his time in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but then came a move to Southern California to join the faculty at CSUSM in 2015.

While Southern California may not carry a reputation as a hotbed of hockey compared to Canada or the East Coast, Perron found he wasn’t alone in his passion for the sport when he started working at CSUSM. In fact, there is so much demand for ice time at Ice-Plex Escondido that the earliest available start time for Perron’s hockey games is 8:30 p.m., and it’s not unusual for him to get home from a game after midnight.

Perron plays in the top level among six divisions in the Ice-Plex adult hockey program, a division reserved for highly skilled players with years of experience.

“There are some really good players in the league,” Perron said, before adding with a laugh, “we’re just all really old. But it’s a blast to go out there and play.

“Most of us who play have some type of junior or college or pretty competitive hockey experience in our background. It’s just getting further and further away in the background. We don’t have the legs and we’re not as fast anymore, but it’s still fun. I just love playing hockey.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Titled “Regenerative water sources on surfaces of airless bodies,” the study concludes that two primary mechanisms are the source of surface water – low-temperature oxidation of organics and mineral dehydration – and they are transformed through the impact of micrometeorites and the heat pulses they generate during an asteroid’s travels.

“Any mechanisms that are discovered that generate water on asteroids are fascinating and help us better understand what is happening in the universe,” Dominguez said. “This helps answer a puzzle as to where this water on asteroid surfaces comes from.”

Dominguez was unaware of the study until he was contacted by the principal investigator, Professor Ralf I. Kaiser, and others at the University of Hawaii. Kaiser and his team had already submitted their research to “Nature Astronomy,” but reviewers were skeptical that the duration of laser pulses used in the experiments, which were aimed at mimicking the heat pulses caused by micrometeorite impacts on asteroid surfaces, were correct. Kaiser came across Dominguez’s earlier research on micrometeorite impacts into solids and asked the CSUSM professor to provide theoretical modeling on the amount of heat and the duration of heat-pulses generated by micrometeorite impacts that were needed to convince “Nature Astronomy’s” peer reviewers.

Mission accomplished.

In fact, Dominguez’s research has long been aimed at unlocking the secrets of the universe. His work has earned Dominguez recognition from the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as a top researcher in planetary astrophysics and atmospheric chemistry. Ongoing research includes exploring the isotopic composition of molecular clouds to understand how the sun and the planets of our solar system were formed. He also has conducted extensive research in the application of nano-optical techniques for mapping the chemical composition of meteorites and cometary dust grains.

This past summer, a CSUSM team led by Dominguez was one of eight research teams from around the country awarded a $10.5 million grant to study the origins of ice on the moon.

Not bad for a first-generation American and self-described nerd from San Pedro who grew up devouring books about how things worked.

“How the universe works, how atoms work, it all just fascinated me as a kid,” he said.

Dominguez earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate in physics from UC Berkeley. He has been teaching at CSUSM since 2011.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Though Silvia is grateful for a strong support system of friends in North County, it’s still challenging being a single mom attending school full time, working multiple jobs and caring for a son with spastic quadriplegia, a severe form of cerebral palsy.

But Silvia never thinks about moving back to Colombia.

“I made a life here, and I feel like I can be successful with what I'm doing here,” Silvia said. “Here, there's so many opportunities for research and you can do world-class things, revolutionize, if you will. In the U.S., the opportunities are endless.”

For Silvia, one of those opportunities included a prestigious workshop at Princeton University in July. Silvia and fellow CSUSM physics student Mireya Juarez were among 20 students from throughout the country selected to participate in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Undergraduate Workshop in Plasma Physics. The four-day workshop provided students an overview of plasma physics, fusion and the research done at PPPL, which is a collaborative national center for fusion energy research that is managed by Princeton.

Silvia and Mireya joined other participants in attending lectures and conducting experiments. The program is designed to encourage women and people from underrepresented backgrounds to consider a career in physics. It was particularly inspiring for Silvia that the program was led by a fellow Colombian, Arturo Dominguez, who is a science education senior program leader at the PPPL.

“It was cool to see somebody and to meet somebody that is also Colombian that succeeded and is at Princeton,” she said. “I thought, ‘If he did it, then I can probably do it, too.’ ”

The road to becoming a scientist has been an unexpected journey for Silvia, who earned a degree while studying physiotherapy at Universidad del Rosario in her native Colombia more than a decade ago. She worked as a physical therapist in Colombia before moving to the United States in 2009 with her now ex-husband, a Marine who was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá.

The extensive process to practice physical therapy in the U.S., coupled with Silvia’s waning interest in the field, led her to consider returning to school. She always had a passion for science and was intrigued by a career in engineering.

But it wasn’t an easy decision. She would essentially be starting from scratch after years of experience in the health-care field. There were her son’s health challenges to consider. And starting over in her 30s seemed daunting.

It was a conversation with her mom that helped convince Silvia to make the change.

“She said, ‘What makes you happy? Because that’s what it’s about. Life is about being happy,’ ” Silvia said. “I said, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to work in engineering.’ And she said, ‘Go for it.’

“My family was really supportive, and that made it easier.”

Silvia earned her associate degree at MiraCosta College and transferred to CSUSM for fall 2018. Now 37, Silvia has embraced the age gap between her and most of her classmates. Many have a difficult time believing that she’s nearly two decades older than them. One classmate even requested to see her ID because they didn’t believe she was that much older. And she said her maternal instincts often kick in when it comes to her classmates, just as it did at the PPPL workshop.

“It was a lot of 19-, 20-year-olds, so I felt like I was responsible for the entire group somehow,” she said. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re not the mom.’ And I’m like, ‘But I feel like I am a little bit.’

“I am very protective of the younger crowd and I’ve always tried to be a mentor. If I know something that they don’t know or if they’re looking for guidance, I’m really happy to help because I didn’t really have that when I was in school back in Colombia.”

Silvia makes time for her classmates despite her myriad commitments. In addition to her full-times studies, she is part of CSUSM’s Summer Scholars program working in the lab of physics professor Stephen Tsui, a math facilitator for the university’s Readiness and Success program and a math tutor at MiraCosta College.

Tsui first learned of Silvia through fellow physics professor Chuck De Leone, who thought she would be a good fit for Tsui’s lab. Then Tsui saw her work firsthand last spring when she took his advanced lab course.

“She was very focused in the lab course,” Tsui said. “They work in groups, and there were times when she was the one in her group helping to keep people on task because her grade was important to her.”

Silvia’s success in the class helped her get selected to work under Tsui during Summer Scholars, a 10-week program that pairs a student with a faculty mentor to gain hands-on research experience. Silvia is spending 20 hours a week in the lab this summer examining the heat capacity properties of the mineral magnetite and will present her work during the Summer Scholars Poster Showcase on Aug. 8.

But her top priority is Matthew, her 7-year-old son who has been at Rady Children’s Hospital’s rehabilitation wing since 2015.

Silvia commutes multiple times each week from her Vista home to Rady in San Diego to be with Matthew, and she spends many late nights there studying while he sleeps.

“She’s very driven,” Tsui said. “It’s not just for her. What she’s doing is for her and her son. Her dream one day is to be in mechanical engineering. After she’s done here, I think she’ll be able to go on to whatever she wants to do, and she’ll be great at it.”

Silvia will graduate in May and plans to pursue a master’s in mechanical engineering at UC San Diego. Leaving San Diego County for her master’s isn’t an option because she wants to ensure that Matthew continues receiving the care he needs at Rady.

“It’s been a journey,” Silvia said. “I’m proud of what I have done thus far. With all the effort that I have put in my academics and in life so far, I’m starting to see that it’s finally paying off. It’s a good feeling.

“The university is so supportive of students like me. The faculty members of the physics department, my peers, everybody is just amazing. This is an amazing university. I’m proud to be here.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The challenge was this: Come to our laboratory over the summer and try to devise a solution to a problem related to the topic of transactive energy. Ochoa was a physics student who loves to try to decipher complex puzzles, so this invitation was like a siren song to him.  

As he embarked on a project that might end up changing his life, he had just one question: What exactly is transactive energy? 

It wouldn’t be the first time that Ochoa and the other students essentially were thrown in at the deep end and asked to swim. In the course of the unpaid internship, they were exposed to other relatively foreign concepts like microgrids, blockchains and internet of things.  

By the end of the summer, most of the students returned to school, satisfied that they had expanded their knowledge base. But for Ochoa and three others who came to be friends and partners, the experience was merely a jumping-off point.  

Almost a year later, Ochoa is the CEO of a startup company called simpl (in the style of modern tech firms, the “S” is lower case and the “E” is omitted intentionally) that builds off work done during the transactive energy project. The 2018 CSUSM graduate founded the business with fellow alumni Dragan Lukic (computer science, 2019) and Daniel Sanchez (physics, 2019) as well as Palomar College product Nate Wise, who will begin studying engineering at UCLA this fall.  

“We knew nothing about the topic beforehand,” Ochoa said. “But in eight months, we were able to accumulate a vast amount of knowledge and put something together.” 

Transactive energy represents a new approach to dealing with the reality of the old and outdated energy grid in the United States, and the additional strain put on it by the increasing popularity of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. It’s based on the idea of microgrid technology, which involves breaking up the existing grid that spans large regions into smaller chunks that can be powered by renewables. 

“What transactive energy is and what our project focused on is, instead of power being generated miles and miles away and then being transported over these large grid systems, how can we get a system powered by renewable energy – in our case, it was solar – integrated with the grid to be functionable with pre-existing technology and infrastructure?” Wise said. 

The quartet of students first experimented with a hardware solution. At Open Source Maker Labs, the Vista makerspace that offered the U.S. Navy-sponsored project, they built and tested a small microgrid using solar panels and batteries.  

At the time, they were still just a group of enthusiastic engineers-in-training who were having fun putting their brains together to solve a problem. It was Dan Hendricks, a former Navy captain who established OSML in 2014, who urged the four non-business students to strongly consider forming a business. 

“What triggered me to make the suggestion was not just the technology they were working on, but seeing how they worked together,” Hendricks said. “They didn’t know each other before but very quickly formed a cohesive and focused team. That’s a key ingredient for a startup, so that’s what prompted me to say, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about going into business?’ ”

They hadn’t. But as they began to mull over how they might monetize their initial work, they quickly realized that the cost to produce thousand-dollar microgrids in mass quantities would be prohibitive.

Several iterations of a possible company later, they came up with an idea that they believe lives up to its name. Simpl is a software platform – a website and a mobile app – that facilitates a connection between your thermostat and the droves of solar energy firms that may want you as a customer. The target audience is residential clients and small to medium businesses.

“Your thermostat is the highest energy-consuming thing in most homes,” Ochoa said. “What we show you is how much it costs to be comfortable, how much it costs to be at a given temperature. Then, taking that information, we show you your utility bill and how much that’s costing you, and then we show you, with the current cost of renewables, how much that would cost you and here’s the breakdown.

“Right now, it takes a bunch of work to get that information. You have to do months of research, you have to get quote after quote. With simpl, it’s, ‘Here’s your utility bill, here’s the return on investment you could be making,’ and then we pair you with the right company that can address that need.”

Ochoa said he and his partners researched the market and found potential competitors – from solar companies to smart home companies to utilities themselves – that were addressing some of the needs that simpl aims to fulfill, but none that was tackling the issue as a whole. Because the platform has such low overhead, the foursome are funding the venture on their own so far.

They plan to initiate a three-week pilot program of about 30 users on July 13, followed by an alpha program featuring more than 100. If everything progresses smoothly, the business could be launched formally by the end of the year.

Asked what has surprised him most about the process, Lukic said: “That we made it this far. When we first discussed starting this company, I never imagined that we would be so close to doing a pilot program to actually get our product going.”

It seemed fitting that the simpl team was speaking during San Diego Startup Week, May 28 to June 3, and from the OSML offices at the heart of the Highway 78 corridor. OSML is part of Innovate 78, a collaboration of the five cities along the freeway – Carlsbad, Escondido, Oceanside, San Marcos and Vista – to boost economic prosperity in the region.

A few businesses have germinated from OSML already. Team simpl hopes that they are next.

“With so many technological challenges that we’re all facing, how can we get the workforce to accelerate in their learning beyond traditional methods?” Hendricks said. “The current method is you have to stay in school four years before you can be productive. Our hypothesis is, ‘No, people are capable of learning a lot faster than we give them credit for.’ I think these guys proved that in spades.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

But when Oberem steps down as CSUSM’s provost at the end of June, it will mark the end of a 6½-year tenure, more than double the California State University average of three years for the position.

“Dr. Oberem has been an exceptional leader and advocate for Academic Affairs,” said President Karen Haynes, who also will be retiring at the end of June. “I appreciate his thoughtfulness in consideration of university challenges and opportunities, his creation of a strong Academic Affairs leadership team and his seniority and credibility among the CSU provosts.”

A native of South Africa, Oberem arrived at CSUSM in 1996 as the university’s first physics hire. CSUSM didn’t have a physics department at the time – and Oberem was told there wouldn’t be one – so it was suggested that he become faculty in either chemistry or computer science while he taught physics courses. Instead, he convinced his dean to allow him to be an independent unit, providing the opportunity to manage his own budget while he set up the new physics labs.

Before his first semester on campus ended, Oberem wrote to the dean laying out exactly why the university needed a physics department. Most university physics departments at the time focused on preparing students for graduate school, but Oberem advocated for an applied physics program.

“Part of the reason I came here was because of the students we serve,” Oberem said. “I believed strongly that if we had a degree that emphasized applied physics, these students would be highly marketable in the regional job market with a bachelor’s degree. That really did prove to be true, even from the outset.”

The physics program celebrated its 10^th anniversary in 2017, and the department was recognized earlier this year by the American Physical Society for being ranked sixth in the nation based on the number of undergraduate physics degrees awarded to underrepresented minorities.

Oberem’s career took an unexpected turn in 2006 when he agreed to serve a four-year term as an associate dean for the erstwhile College of Arts and Sciences. The split of the colleges was announced at the end of his term, and then-Provost Emily Cutrer asked if he would stay on two more years and move to the new College of Science and Mathematics.

Near the end of the year, Cutrer announced that she was hiring an associate vice president for planning and academic resources, the position now known as vice provost. Intrigued by the job description, Oberem applied and, following a national search, was appointed to the position on May 1, 2012.

By the end of the year, Cutrer had left for a presidential opening in Texas. Haynes asked Oberem to serve as the interim provost while a national search was conducted for a permanent replacement. For the second time in less than a year, Oberem was an applicant in a national search and, for the second time, he got the job.

As Oberem’s time as an administrator nears its end, he is looking forward to spending more time with his family and pursuing his other interests – he is an accomplished musician and enjoys photography. He also is considering participating in the Faculty Early Retirement Program, which allows eligible tenured faculty to continue teaching part-time.

Oberem is grateful for more than two decades at CSUSM. Founding the physics department was just one of many notable achievements. As provost, he led the creation of the Office of Undergraduate Studies and he was also part of the effort to launch the university’s engineering program. But more than anything, he will miss the people.

“The people here are incredible,” he said. “What’s unique about this campus is the level of collaboration and genuine caring for one another. That’s one of the reasons that I came here.

“It’s just been really amazing.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Lauren had only recently started taking physics courses and was touring some of the labs when her professor, Stephen Tsui, had to step away. He told Lauren to look around while he attended to another matter. Lauren knocked on the first door she saw, which happened to be Dominguez’s lab. She poked her head in and asked what he did.

Dominguez’s research interests include astrophysics, also one of Lauren’s passions, so he invited her in and provided an impromptu overview of his work.

“I was so happy,” Lauren said. “I asked him if I could start working in his lab. I was probably only a month into my first physics class.”

Dominguez recommended that she come back after completing more of the physics basics. She kept his contact information and returned after completing her second physics course.

Lauren’s persistence paid off. She not only earned a place working in Dominguez’s lab, but had the opportunity to present her research earlier this month in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.

“Lauren joined the lab in late spring of 2018 and as a junior has already had an impact on the work we do,” Dominguez said. “She is developing protocols for experiments aimed at understanding the behavior of water in astrophysical environments. This is important work, and she is doing what a first-year graduate student at an R1 institution would be doing.

“It’s a pleasure to work with her, and I’m lucky to have her as part of my research group here at CSUSM.”

It’s a far different path than the one Lauren planned when she enrolled at CSUSM.

Lauren wanted to study something she considered practical, so she chose accounting, the same major her mother pursued. But from the moment she started taking accounting classes, she realized it was a poor fit. She began reading some of the philosophy books that her mother had at home and became interested in philosophical theories about the universe. It wasn’t long before she changed her major to applied physics.

Lauren completed Physics 201 in the months following her initial meeting with Dominguez and returned to his lab after taking Physics 202. Dominguez suggested that she attend his weekly student lab meetings and read up on topics such as geochemistry, isotopes and vacuum systems.

“It was a little intimidating at first,” she said. “Everyone in the lab tries to be really supportive, but they also have a lot of work to do. I just had the mindset of ‘I can do it. I can figure it out.’ ”

When students used unfamiliar terms during the meetings, Lauren would write them down and look them up later. Her efforts led to her being selected for the College of Science and Mathematics’ Summer Scholars Program, a 10-week program in which students work closely with a faculty mentor to gain hands-on experience. In Lauren’s case, that meant an opportunity to further her research in Dominguez’s lab. When the Summer Scholars Program ended, Dominguez offered Lauren a paid position in the lab, which she happily accepted.

Last fall, Dominguez suggested that they present their research at the 233^rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Lauren jumped at the opportunity. She was one of just a handful of undergraduate students in attendance.

“Everyone was really inclusive,” said Lauren, who will graduate in May 2020 and plans to pursue her Ph.D. in physics. “It was a really supportive environment. Being able to represent Cal State San Marcos at the conference gave me a lot of collaboration opportunities.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

After joining SPS, Jesus started attending conferences and participating in physics events on campus. He even served as the group’s treasurer during the 2017-18 academic year.

Jesus’ work paid off in another way as he was selected to receive the 2018 Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement, the California State University’s highest recognition of student achievement. Jesus was named a Trustee Emeritus Murray L. Galinson Scholar.

The CSU recognizes 23 students every year – one from each CSU campus – with the Trustees’ Award, which accompanies a donor-funded scholarship ranging from $6,000 to $12,000. The awardees will be publicly recognized during the CSU Board of Trustees meeting in Long Beach on Sept. 11.

Students are selected for their exceptional efforts in the classroom and community. Awardees demonstrate superior academic performance, personal accomplishments, community service and financial need. Many have shown inspirational resolve along the path to college success and are the first in their families to attend college.

“These student scholars embody the leadership, diversity and academic excellence the California State University is known for,” said CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White. “They have traced unique paths to their goal of a higher education and serve as powerful examples to their families, communities and California. The awards will give these high-achieving and deserving students even more opportunities to attain their academic and career goals.”

The Trustees’ Award is just the latest honor for Jesus, who was recognized in June with a Society of Physics Students Leadership Scholarship, awarded to students who have exhibited outstanding academic and personal achievements.

In May, Jesus was part of a four-student team honored with the Library Award for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity, a CSUSM honor recognizing students demonstrating sophistication and originality in their research projects and creative works.

Jesus, who will graduate next spring with a bachelor’s in applied physics, spent the fall 2016 semester as an intern for the Science of Undergraduate Laboratory Internships program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey. This summer, he was an intern at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Jesus is also an Alliance Ambassador for CSUSM’s Alliance to Accelerate Excellence in Education, which works collaboratively with regional partners to ensure that all K-12 students have access to a college education and are successful in persevering toward a degree.

More than 340 students have been honored with the Trustees’ Award since the scholarship program was established in 1984 by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. In 1999, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation partnered with the CSU Board of Trustees to supplement the endowment with contributions from CSU Trustees, CSU Foundation Board of Governors, and private donors. Each student scholarship bears the name of a donor.

About California State University San Marcos

Building on an innovative 28-year history, California State University San Marcos is a forward-focused institution, dedicated to preparing future leaders, building great communities and solving critical issues. Located on a 304-acre hillside overlooking the City of San Marcos, it is the only public four-year comprehensive university serving North San Diego, Southwest Riverside and South Orange Counties.

The University enrolls 17,000 students. With approximately 2,000 employees, the institution is a Great College to Work For® (The Chronicle of Higher Education). As a recipient of the annual HEED Award since 2014—a national honor recognizing U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion—CSUSM is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment.

After joining SPS, Jesus started attending conferences and participating in physics events on campus. He even served as the group’s treasurer during the 2017-18 academic year.

Jesus’ work with SPS paid off in another way this month when he received an SPS Leadership Scholarship in the amount of $2,000.

SPS Scholarships are awarded to students who have exhibited outstanding academic and personal achievements. The scholarship funds are made available through donations by members of Sigma Pi Sigma, an honor society that is part of SPS.

“My goal in SPS was to be a leader and take our chapter further in the science community,” Jesus said.

CSUSM’s chapter attended multiple national physics conferences this year, and Jesus helped inform and encourage students to attend. He also mentored students in his research lab and assisted classmates in their physics courses.

“Jesus has a lot of impressive qualities,” said Justin Perron, an assistant professor of physics and CSUSM’s SPS faculty adviser. “In the classroom it is clear he is very intelligent, has a very strong work ethic and is genuinely interested in the underlying physics. The combination of these traits inevitably leads to excellent performance in his classes.

“Outside of the classroom, through his involvement with SPS, he shows an impressive amount of initiative and independence. Whenever he gets an idea for an event or activity he doesn’t hesitate to do what it takes to make it happen, and he does so with minimal guidance.”

As one example, Perron cited an outreach event that CSUSM’s SPS chapter hosted at the Palomar Planetarium. Perron said the event required significant organization and logistics, including raising funds from multiple sources, organizing volunteers from Palomar, CSUSM and local industries, and arranging travel and permission slips from multiple middle schools.

Perron said Jesus led a team of SPS members and identified all of the necessary tasks for the event to be a success while solving any issues that cropped up.

“His independence made my role as an adviser extremely simple,” Perron said. “Every time he updated me it was almost shocking that he didn’t need any help from me and that everything, even with an event of that size, was under control. That sort of independence is rare, especially in an undergraduate student.”

Jesus credits SPS for getting him more involved with the physics community. It wasn’t until he became a member that he attended a physics conference or participated in a physics event on campus.

“It is motivating to know you have a group of people with you chasing the same dream,” he said. “SPS has provided enormous amounts of opportunities, including outreach, research and travel.”

Jesus said he will use the scholarship to help pay summer tuition and start saving for graduate school. He is spending much of his summer in the Washington, D.C., area for an internship with the National Institute of Standards and Technology – and he noted that the internship opportunity came through his association with SPS.

Jesus will graduate from CSUSM next spring before pursuing his Ph.D. in plasma physics.

But before he leaves, Jesus plans to encourage more CSUSM students to join him in SPS – and he emphasized that SPS is open to all regardless of their major.

“I tell people not to worry – we don't do any math in the club,” he said. “We like to blow things up, watch movies and have fun with the community through outreach.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

After rising to some 75,000 feet – or nearly 25 miles – high enough to capture the curvature of the Earth, the balloon and its data, carefully tracked by a group of Cal State San Marcos science students, landed safely 56 miles from the launch site.

Welcome to Dr. Michael Burin’s Physics 480 class, which, for the first time tasked students with planning, designing and completing a high-altitude balloon launch aimed at collecting and interpreting data – all part of a hands-on, project-based experience to prepare them for future careers in the sciences.

“It was quite an interesting class,” said Christopher Delgadillo, a senior graduating this spring with a degree in applied physics and plans that include earning a Ph.D. “Unlike any other course I’ve taken in the Department of Physics.”

The mission was straightforward enough.

“I wanted to do something a little different this year, so we decided to try out a high-altitude balloon launch,” Burin said. “The main goal is for students to become more familiar with how to obtain data, while also introducing them to working with teams and deadlines.”

Twenty students broke off into different teams, each provided with operational requirements to meet within a set budget and timeline. Ongoing design reviews were held to improve the probability of mission success. All prototyping, and testing of the payload and flight systems, took place at Open Source Maker Lab in Vista – a high-tech, digital fabrication hub for members to collaborate, innovate, design and build almost anything – under the direction of president Dan Hendricks.

The course culminated with an April 14 launch in Borrego Springs. The landing came 56 miles away outside of Plaster City in the Imperial County desert. Data was analyzed at CSUSM in the following weeks.

“Overall, the project went very well,” said Burin, Department of Physics chair. “It provided our students an opportunity to engage in scientific research outside of the campus, which is what they’re going to be doing in real life.”

Alyssa Martinez agreed. The CSUSM junior is majoring in applied physics with plans to earn a Ph.D. in medical physics and launching a career in oncology. She was responsible for determining where to launch from, what the weather would be like, where to land, and other logistical elements.

“We started from nothing, just an idea,” Martinez said. “We had to determine how to get a payload onto this balloon and send it off into inner space, all while ensuring sensors were properly connected to gauge various data.”

“I greatly enjoyed this project,” Martinez continued. “I’m going to be doing a lot of research in the future, and this was a great exercise in engaging how to engage in research in the real world.”

Her team was so motivated by the effort that several students are taking it upon themselves to improve upon their work and engage in a second launch this summer.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

“Having been involved in the development, for instance, of our applied physics degree, it’s tremendously satisfying to see these programs come to fruition and students graduate and go off and get jobs,” said Price, a professor of physics. “That, to me, is one of the great parts of working at this University.”

Price is on the ground floor of another project as the faculty director of CSUSM’s new Center for Research and Engagement in STEM Education (CRESE), which officially launched July 1.

The idea for the center emerged from work Price and fellow physics professor Chuck De Leone have done together over the last several years, which has included a number of sizable federal grant awards. Price said that Program Director Debbie DeRoma also was instrumental in making CRESE a reality.

As the center’s name suggests, its mission is to support STEM education research and support engagement in STEM education. That includes engaging the community, K-12 students and teachers, and CSUSM undergraduates.

Price notes that CRESE is separate from the STEM Tutoring Program, which operates under the Office for Undergraduate Studies. While the STEM Tutoring Program focuses on academic support for students, CRESE will be involved in things like research to develop new programs as well as testing pilot programs and documenting their effectiveness.

“There are a range of different access points for faculty,” Price said. “For some faculty, it may be that this is just a point where they can connect with colleagues who are interested in a topic. Maybe they have some ideas about something they want to do but it’s not what their training is in necessarily.

“The teacher-scholar model here is really strong and faculty are thinking about what they can do in the classroom to help their students be successful.”

CRESE is funded entirely through grants, and Price anticipates that the center will greatly benefit faculty submitting proposals related to STEM education research projects.

“It’s a great umbrella for us to have,” he said. “That’s a great banner to be putting a proposal under. Rather than just me as an individual, it signals there’s something larger going on here with more support and resources connected with that effort.

“One of the things that we’re really excited about with having the center is moving beyond the efforts of individuals, of which there are several very active individual faculty on this campus doing this kind of work, but now to have a more higher profile collective way for us to organize that work.”

One of Price’s first priorities is to promote awareness on campus about the center. He said some faculty members already have expressed interest in being affiliated with the center and he anticipates getting them on board once they return to campus this fall.

“Part of the proposal process for the center was to describe how the activities of the center will enhance the university’s mission,” Price said. “And I think it’s right in line with what we’re trying to do here on this campus to have innovative pedagogy, to support students and to support faculty. Getting approval for the center indicates confidence from the administration, and we’re excited about being able to advance the university’s mission through the work of the center.”

The Distinguished Physics Lecture event is free and open to the public. It begins at 5:30 p.m. with light refreshments, followed by the presentation from 6-7 p.m. in the USU Ballroom on CSUSM’s campus.

Ash, the director of outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy, has hosted and appeared in science and STEM educational videos for NBC News, City University of New York and Disney Junior. Her work as a science writer has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Slate, among other publications. She also appears on “The Rachel Maddow Show” as their in-house astrophysicist.

The lecture coincides with a week of activities being hosted by CSUSM’s College of Science and Mathematics leading up to Super STEM Saturday on March 11.

What: Distinguished Physics Lecture, featuring the presentation “The Invisible Universe: Seeing What Our Eyes Can’t” by Dr. Summer Ash, director of outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy.

When: Tuesday, March 7; reception at 5:30 p.m., presentation 6-7 p.m.

Where: USU Ballroom, California State University San Marcos

Cost: Free

Parking: For driving directions, campus map and parking fees, visit the CSUSM Parking Guide.

About California State University San Marcos

Building on an innovative 27-year history, California State University San Marcos is a forward-focused institution, dedicated to preparing future leaders, building great communities and solving critical issues. Located on a 304-acre hillside overlooking the City of San Marcos, it is the only public four-year comprehensive university serving North San Diego, Southwest Riverside and South Orange Counties.

The University enrolls over 15,000 students. With approximately 2,000 employees, the institution is a Great College to Work For® (The Chronicle of Higher Education). As a recipient of the annual HEED Award since 2014—a national honor recognizing U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion—CSUSM is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment.

Here's a closer look at those faculty members for the grant, which is titled “Si Se Puede!” to Close the Equity Gap in Engineering Degree Completion:

Meet Dr. Gerardo Dominguez

Dr. Gerardo Dominguez is trying to unlock the secrets of the universe.

An associate professor of physics at Cal State San Marcos, Dominguez has been recognized by Great Minds in STEM within the Hispanic science and engineering community for outstanding achievement in technology, NASA, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as a top researcher in planetary astrophysics and atmospheric chemistry.

“I’ve always enjoyed figuring out the ‘why’ of the world,” said Dominguez, who has been at CSUSM since 2011. “It brings me peace and satisfaction, and it drives me to stay up at night thinking about the mysteries of our age, including the origins of life, water and the terrestrial planets.”

Dominguez is the project director on the Hispanic-Serving Institutions STEM Program grant that is providing foundational funding for the University’s inaugural software and electrical engineering programs.

“Providing that opportunity for students coming to San Marcos to have a bachelors in electrical engineering or software engineering will be tremendous for our region,” he said.

Meet Dr. Youwen Ouyang

Dr. Youwen Ouyang has always been impressed by the young women who participate in the biannual Women’s Hackathon at Cal State San Marcos.

The event generates excitement among female high school and college students who work collaboratively using computer science to address a selected real-world challenge.

Ouyang, the chair of CSUSM’s computer science program and a faculty member since 1997, is working to build on the one-day Women’s Hackathon thanks to a recently awarded three-year grant for $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation.

Ouyang is also a co-principal investigator on the HSI STEM grant. The College of Science and Mathematics is launching a national search this spring to hire the founding faculty in software engineering.

As the lead software engineering designer for CSUSM’s engineering program, Ouyang will be responsible for ensuring that the software engineering program is interdisciplinary and builds on the strengths of CSUSM’s closely related computer science program.

Meet Dr. Ed Price

Dr. Ed Price recalls sitting in most of his classes while somebody lectured to him when he was a student.

“We have a lot of evidence now that that’s not a very effective way for people to learn science, and physics in particular,” said Price, a professor of physics at Cal State San Marcos.

Price is part of a project that aims to better prepare tomorrow’s teachers to effectively teach science thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. Price, who is a nationally recognized leader in physics education research, is the principal investigator on an award totaling $2,877,300, the largest NSF grant ever awarded to a CSUSM faculty member.

Price is also a co-principal investigator on the engineering grant.

As CSUSM’s lead electrical engineering designer, Price’s role is ensuring that the planned electrical engineering program builds on the strengths of the University’s physics program.

The latest installment was held Dec. 15 on campus, providing teams of physics and computer science students an opportunity to showcase projects in which they designed and programmed a microsystem.

“It’s fun for the students and they love the hands on stuff,” said David Schaafsma, a physics lecturer who teaches a Physics 402 course that provides an introduction to the design and use of digital computer interfaces.

Tyler Jarrett and Christopher Pearson were among the students who presented projects to local industry representatives at the Robot Expo. For their project, “COLORtron, a Gumball Sorting Experience,” they designed an autonomous gumball-sorting robot capable of separating the contents of a bag of gumballs by color.

Tyler and Christopher will both graduate in the spring. Tyler expects to continue working at General Atomics, where he has been an intern for more than two years, while Christopher plans to pursue his MBA.

“If there had been an electrical engineering major, I probably wouldn’t have been a physics major,” Christopher said. “I love physics, but if they had electrical engineering, I probably would’ve gone right into it.”

CSUSM students will soon have that choice with plans underway to offer new degree programs in software engineering and electrical engineering.

Drawing upon existing courses in computer science and physics and tapping into the expertise of faculty, CSUSM is designing an engineering curriculum strongly focused on practical experiences. Hands-on undergraduate research, industry internships and summer research fellowships will offer robust and relevant learning experiences for students. A notable feature of the programs will be their iterative approach, continually cycling feedback from students, faculty and industry advisors to inform program design.

The new engineering programs could debut as early as fall 2017. While much as been accomplished, university officials note that there is still much to do. Private philanthropic support and industry partnership are needed to fully launch engineering at CSUSM.

Jesus, an applied physics major at Cal State San Marcos, knew the email’s content would detail whether he had been accepted as a fall intern for the Science of Undergraduate Laboratory Internships program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey.

With a test scheduled in his math class, Jesus’ first reaction was to ignore the email until after his class. Why subject himself to potentially bad news before a test?

“But I figured I’d get it out of the way and it said, ‘Dear Jesus, congratulations,’ ” he said. “My jaw just dropped. I looked around to see if there was anyone I knew to celebrate with. I was kind of speechless for a couple minutes. I couldn’t believe it.”

Jesus doesn’t recall how he did on the math test, but the memories of the prestigious internship will last a lifetime.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a collaborative national center for fusion energy research. Managed by Princeton University, it is part of the national laboratory system funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Office of Science.

There has been a growing focus on getting undergraduates trained to fill the need for plasma physicists, and CSUSM’s physics department has been identified as a strategic location able to provide the necessary expertise and training to produce such students.

The internship coordinator for the PPPL even visited CSUSM last year to meet with Dr. Michael Burin, CSUSM’s physics department chair, and continued to be in touch while Jesus was at PPPL.

“Overall he was quite impressed with Jesus,” said Burin, who did his postdoctoral research at PPPL. “Jesus was able to pick things up very rapidly.”

Jesus had a mentor through the internship program, but primarily worked independently on his project, “Development of the Remote Planeterella Experiment.” The project included designing the software and hardware to reproduce astrophysical plasma phenomena in a laboratory setting.

“It was really an engineering-heavy internship,” he said. “The ultimate goal was designing a machine that could recreate some of the plasma that we see in space and have ordinary people from anywhere in the world be able to access and manipulate the machine online so that they can learn about plasma.”

Jesus succeeded in his design and is able to share his work with friends, colleagues and professors (it can be viewed here).

Jesus learned about the internship through his work at CSUSM with the Alliance to Accelerate Excellence in Education. His office is located near the office of Cynthia Chavez Metoyer, CSUSM’s faculty director for internships. Knowing Jesus’ passion for physics and engineering, Chavez Metoyer passed along the information about the internship and suggested he take a look.

Jesus considered himself a long shot to land the internship because he had little lab experience. However, Kathleen Corona, Jesus’ supervisor at the Alliance, encouraged him to follow through on the application.

Jesus’ perseverance paid off. The internship covered his housing and travel expenses and he received a stipend for his work during the 16-week program.

“Every once in a while I would ask myself, ‘Was there a mistake?’ ” Jesus said. “It was a dream come true because I always wanted to be a scientist and an engineer. Then to get treated like one and get the work of one and be in a facility like that, it was surreal. But after a couple of months and seeing all the work I had put in, it felt like, ‘These are my hallways now. This is where I belong and it’s no surprise that I’m here.’ ”

Jesus plans to pursue a master’s in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. in physics after graduating from CSUSM.

“Jesus has excelled during his time working with the Alliance,” said Erika Daniels, faculty director for the Alliance. “He continually impresses us with his commitment to his education, his willingness to help out in any way, and his kindness to everyone around him. The fact that the U.S. Department of Energy recognized his talents is not surprising to us, and we look forward to seeing all that he will achieve once he graduates from college.”

As the first in his family to attend college, Jesus is hoping to set an example for his younger nieces to show them what is possible.

“I want to show them that college is a ridiculously great opportunity,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Cal State San Marcos, I would’ve never gone to Princeton and been able to do what I’ve done. I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it wasn’t for college.”

But, as a recent open house showed, those days are long in the past.

Nearly two dozen Cal State San Marcos faculty members participated in this year’s annual Bridges Open House, which gave students from MiraCosta College and Palomar College an opportunity to tour labs and speak with professors.

Garcia is the principal investigator and biology professor Tracey Brown is the project director on the Bridges grant, which is a partnership between CSUSM, Palomar and MiraCosta. Funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the program helps prepare underrepresented students for a seamless transition to a four-year university and a career in biomedical sciences.

There are Bridges programs throughout the country, but CSUSM’s is unique in that it is year round compared to the shorter summer stints that many other programs offer.

“We think getting students here several times a semester helps integrate them into a four-year institution and understand the culture and how things are done,” said Garcia, who is the associate dean for the College of Education, Health and Human Services.

The grant provides funding for 20 students – 10 from Palomar and 10 from MiraCosta – who each receive a stipend. Students meet with their site coordinators – Jim Gilardi at Palomar and Suzie Bailey at MiraCosta – every other Friday and participate in a variety of activities and seminars throughout the year.

Many will attend the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in Tampa, Fla., this month. The conference is an opportunity to learn more about science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, and also offers sessions devoted to writing resumes, polishing interview skills and applying to graduate school.

“There’s probably 1,000 graduate school recruiters there,” Garcia said. “It’s like a Costco warehouse of graduate schools. It’s amazing for the students. And it’s all underrepresented minority science students there, so they’re seeing individuals like themselves. It becomes a great support system.”

CSUSM’s Bridges program has enjoyed tremendous success with about 98 percent of participants transferring to a four-year university and about 75 percent of those students transferring to CSUSM.

Garcia and Brown said the Office for Training, Research and Education in the Sciences (OTRES), including staff members Rita Cooper and Celia Martinez, is instrumental in assisting with the logistics of the program and coordinating with Palomar and MiraCosta.

Many Bridges participants eventually move on to CSUSM’s programs for Maximizing Access to Research Careers-Undergraduate Student Training Research (MARC U*STAR) and Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE), which help “bridge” students to doctoral studies.

Garcia and Brown said their biggest challenge is helping the families of Bridges students understand the value of the program.

“It’s not just a challenge for our grant, but all sorts of grants,” Brown said. “A lot of participants are first-generation students, and they’re all underrepresented minorities. Even if the student themselves understand the benefits of graduate school and Ph.D.s or even bachelor’s degrees and how that will help them in their lifetime, the families, which is their support, don’t always understand it.”

Said Garcia: “They’re all very motivated and they’re all great kids. They just have outside commitments and pressures that we have to navigate very sensitively.”

The Bridges grant runs over a five-year cycle, and Brown said they are looking for ways to incorporate the families into the program for the next funding cycle. One idea is to hold an open house for the families of Bridges students.

The student open house has certainly been a big hit. Not only has it gained widespread popularity among CSUSM faculty, but it has shown students the research and lab opportunities available to them. It also allows students to connect with peers who have been through the program.

“Their peers say, ‘I was you two years ago. Look where I am now,’ ” Brown said. “They see that and it makes it more tangible for them.”

The program has had 11 students go on to complete their Ph.D. with another 13 enrolled in a Ph.D. program. It has also seen 24 students earn their master’s.

“The statistics show that it has been a huge success,” said Garcia, who was a first-generation college student herself. “We’re looking to write more grants to hopefully scale it up for students in other academic areas. The success is amazing.”

But some two decades later, engineering is back on his radar.

Dominguez, an associate professor of physics at Cal State San Marcos, is the project director for a recently awarded grant worth nearly $6 million under the Hispanic-Serving Institutions STEM Program. The grant will provide foundational funding for establishing an engineering program at CSUSM.

“I’m hoping that this, together with support from local stakeholders in the community and local companies that are interested in seeing an engineering program launch, will help us develop a high quality engineering program for this region,” Dominguez said.

Though it’s only early October, it has already been an eventful fall semester for Dominguez. In addition to news of the HSI grant, he is among the 2016 Class of Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC) Award winners who will be honored at the 28th Annual HENAAC Conference in Anaheim this week. Dominguez, a CSUSM faculty member since 2011, is being honored for Outstanding Technical Achievement.

Dominguez is quick to spread credit to others for CSUSM’s success in obtaining the HSI grant, noting that the application was put together by a team that includes co-principal investigators Ed Price, a professor of physics, and Youwen Ouyang, the department chair of computer science and information systems.

While the amount of the grant is significant, Dominguez said it is just a start. Launching an engineering program will require private-sector funding, and Dominguez noted that it still must go through an internal approval process that includes review by a number of committees before going to the chancellor’s office for approval.

“There are all kinds of decisions that will need to be made in the coming months about how to start spending this money and spend it wisely,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez said an engineering program at CSUSM can help fill an important regional void for students who would otherwise need to attend San Diego State or UC San Diego. He also noted the significance of being able to offer an engineering degree for first-generation college students.

“Having a degree in engineering can be a very low-risk pathway to well-paying jobs with just a bachelor’s degree,” he said. “That’s one thing that can be significant to some of our students.”

Dominguez was a first-generation college student himself and sees himself in many of the students at CSUSM, where more than half of attendees are first in their families to attend college.

Dominguez’s interest in science was sparked in elementary school when he was drawn to books about asteroids, glaciers and volcanoes. His passion continued to develop thanks to a sixth-grade science teacher. Dominguez vividly remembers a demonstration in which the teacher took an empty metal can, heated it up on a hot plate and showed how air pressure would crush it.

“Just knowing that there’s this whole wide world out there that can be explained through science kept that initial spark going,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez’s aptitude in math and science steered him toward engineering when he went to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate. But in the process of taking a variety of science courses during his first two years he found himself needing to answer a question that would determine his path for the remainder of college: Was he an engineer or a physicist?

Though Dominguez chose the path of physicist, he notes that the motivations of both physicists and engineers is rooted in a desire to understand the world using math and science.

“I think where maybe they deviate is engineers want to apply their knowledge and they want to apply it right away,” he said. “They want to make a product or make something that is practical. Whereas a physicist may start a project with a very specific goal in mind, but if they encounter something that’s a puzzle along the way, they’re happy to follow that puzzle and even forget about the original motivation for studying what they were studying.”

Dominguez wouldn’t be surprised to see future CSUSM students follow a path similar to his when it comes to choosing between different fields. Perhaps they start in engineering only to find physics more to their liking. Or they could start in physics and find their true passion is engineering.

Dominguez is looking forward to that day when CSUSM students will be able to make that choice.

“Providing that opportunity for students coming to San Marcos to have a bachelors in electrical engineering or software engineering will be tremendous for our region,” he said.

It proved so successful, in fact, that it has become a biannual event.

The second annual STEM In Your Backyard: Vista Village event will be from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 9 in the Main Street parking lot across from Wavelength Brewery in downtown Vista. The event is free and open to the public.

The College of Science and Mathematics partnered with Wavelength Brewery and the San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering to hold STEM In Your Backyard: Vista Village as a precursor to Super STEM Saturday last March.

The event was so popular that Hans Haas, owner of Wavelength, and Amanda Coates, education and program manager for the San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering, approached Laurie Schmelzer, Student Services Professional in CSUSM's College of Science and Mathematics, about holding STEM In Your Backyard: Vista Village twice a year.

The second edition features an expanded program and has been extended an additional hour. CSUSM faculty and students from physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biological sciences as well as STEM Ambassadors will be in attendance to help facilitate hands-on experiments and interactive presentations.

Visit the College of Science and Mathematics’ events website for more information.

What: STEM In Your Backyard: Vista Village, a biannual family-friendly event to celebrate science with hands-on experiments and interactive presentations.

When: 1-5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 9

Where: Vista Village in the Main Street parking lot across from Wavelength Brewery

FIS seminars explore the interface between biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics.

“The seminar series started in 2006 and was the only ongoing science seminar series on campus at the time,” said Edward Price, a CSUSM professor of physics. “It remains the premier science seminar at CSUSM.”

FIS attracts an audience of faculty and students from across the sciences and mathematics, brings leading researchers to campus to discuss their results and features industry scientists describing their applied work.

The one-hour seminars are free and open to the public. The seminars are held in Science Hall 2, Room 242 from noon-1 p.m. Visit http://www.csusm.edu/csm/points-of-pride/frontiers/ for more information.

Sept. 29: CSUSM Student All Stars: The ViaSat Summer Scholars Program.

Oct. 20: Student Understanding of Quantum Mechanics. Dr. Gina Passante, assistant professor, department of physics, CSU Fullerton.

Nov. 10: Translational Medicine: Neuroscience Research at a Biotech Startup. Dr. Diana Price, senior director, neurosciences at Neuropore Therapies, Inc.

Dec. 1: Protein Synthesis. Dr. Simpson Joseph, professor, department of chemistry & biochemistry, UCSD.

“We have a lot of evidence now that that’s not a very effective way for people to learn science, and physics in particular,” said Price, a professor of physics at Cal State San Marcos (CSUSM). “There are a lot of other approaches that are more effective. That would include, in general, things that get students actively engaged in class.”

Price is part of a project that aims to better prepare tomorrow’s teachers to effectively teach science thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Price is the principal investigator (PI) on an NSF award totaling $2,877,300, the largest NSF grant ever awarded to a CSUSM faculty member.

The project, titled “A Model of Educational Transformation: Developing a Community of Faculty Implementing Next Generation Physical Science and Everyday Thinking,” includes co-PIs and collaborators from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Kansas State, the University of Maryland, San Diego State and Tennessee Technological University.

The project’s goal is to bring together a community of faculty from across the country – about 50 primarily physics faculty – who will be engaged in transforming their courses and implementing materials in those courses to help prepare future elementary teachers.

“It’s sort of a national priority that we do well in science,” Price said. “It drives innovation and it’s important to understand the world. If we want a public well-educated in science, we need teachers who understand science. It starts at the elementary level. We need to prepare elementary teachers so they can teach their students science.”

While Price said there are many examples of good materials that can be used to help engage students in class, simply having the materials isn’t enough.

“It’s not a case of, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” he said. “Some people do, but not everybody.”

Price hopes this project will help bridge that gap. It will allow faculty to work as a community to share success stories on getting students to buy in to different approaches while also pulling from other resources that are developed along the way.

The project will include a combination of face-to-face meetings between participating faculty as well as online collaboration. Price said there will be a core group of 10 faculty members who will lead small clusters of other professors. The small groups will meet regularly online and the entire group will be able to share all resources.

Funding for the project began Sept. 1. Price and his co-PIs are already getting started with planning and designing, and the core group of faculty is expected to gather at CSUSM in January for a workshop. The core group will recruit other faculty throughout the year to participate in the project with plans to have the entire cohort meet next summer.

Price noted that there have been big changes in the knowledge expected of K-12 students through the Next Generation Science Standards.

“If we’re going to ask our teachers to prepare our students according to our Next Generation Science Standards, we should probably educate our teachers on that same material,” Price said. “The curriculum that all of the faculty in this project are going to be using, that curriculum is designed to align with those Next Generation Science Standards. The students who are in these courses that are planning to go out and become elementary teachers, they’re seeing the exact material. At a higher level, naturally, but they’re seeing the exact material that they’re going to want to be teaching their elementary students down the road. So this course is really designed to help those folks become effective elementary educators. All the faculty on this project will be teaching courses that are designed for future elementary teachers.”

The project has the potential to impact thousands of future elementary educators -- Price said an estimated 7,000 undergraduate students will participate in the project over the next five years.

“You start seeing how this thing could ripple out and it’s really exciting to imagine the kind of scale that you could get to,” Price said. “You could reach a lot of folks.”

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

He’s got the surfboard. He just hasn’t had an opportunity to use it.

“I promised myself if we were moving out to Southern California that I’d do it,” said Perron, an assistant professor of physics in CSUSM’s College of Science and Mathematics. “And I’m halfway there. I have the surfboard, but I haven’t tried it.”

Michael Burin, the physics department chair, has offered to help Perron in his quest to ride Southern California’s waves after a lifetime spent playing hockey.

It’s understandable that they’ve had trouble scheduling time in the water. Perron, who just began his second academic year at CSUSM, has been keeping plenty busy with his teaching and research.

Perron came to CSUSM after doing his post-doctorate work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C.

While working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Buffalo, Perron’s interest was in teaching undergraduate physics and having the opportunity to work with students. But Perron enjoyed the research he was doing at NIST and wanted to continue it after his time there.

CSUSM is providing the best of both worlds – a chance to teach and do research.

“This was an ideal job for both,” he said. “I get to run my own lab, I get to teach courses at an undergraduate level. This is what I was looking for. And San Diego’s a great place.

“Surprisingly, I do miss the snow. My wife is from western New York and my family is in southern Ontario. We’re going to go for Christmas this year and I’m sure we’ll be reminded of the snow at some point and it will be like, ‘OK, let’s go back to the beach.’ ”

Perron’s research involves working with solid-state electronics like transistors.

“Typically, when you think of electricity and conduction, you have a wire, and electrons flow,” he said. “Normally, even physicists, when you’re thinking about it in that sense, you’re thinking about it like you think about water flowing, a continuous liquid. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, but you never actually think about a molecule moving. It’s just fluid water. But when you make an extremely small conductor you actually have to start thinking, ‘There’s only about 50 atoms or so across it,’ and you have to start worrying about the individual electrons. The picture of the ‘electric fluid’ breaks down.

“We can make devices so small that individual electrons have a serious effect on how they work. You can actually design them in a way – they’re called quantum dots – where we can make these really small devices, connect them to our wires and make it so we can count how many electrons we put in a single spot.”

One area of Perron’s research involves taking a quantum dot, removing the electrons, adding a single electron and examining the quantum mechanics.

“It actually has a lot of practical applications for a variety of different fields,” he said. “It’s basically making really small semi-conductors and trying to play with their electrons.”

Perron submitted three grant proposals during the summer, including one that was submitted as the fall semester started. He has one piece of research equipment on the way and two of the proposals were for additional equipment.

“When you’re making measurements at single-electron levels, when things are warm they move and vibrate,” he said. “When those things are all moving around and shaking, it really hinders what you’re trying to do with those electrons. If you can cool it, all those vibrations calm down and stop and you can really look at just your electrons.”

One of the grants that Perron applied for is for a dilution refrigerator, which can cool samples to 10 mK (or -273.14 degrees Celsius) just above absolute zero where thermal vibrations are almost completely gone.

He likely won’t hear about the two equipment proposals until the spring and the other proposal will require further submissions should it pass the first inspection.

But Perron will remain busy in the meantime.

The equipment that he already has secured is expected to arrive later this fall. He is teaching two lecture courses this semester to allow more time to set up his lab so that he can hit the ground running once the equipment arrives. He also serves as the faculty adviser for the Society of Physics Students.

And he is also hoping to add hockey back to the mix this fall.

Perron played hockey for three years at State University of New York-Oswego while working toward his bachelor’s in physics and applied mathematics. He also played in a men’s league while doing his post-doctorate work at NIST.

After not playing during his first year at CSUSM, he’s ready to lace up the skates again.

“It’s hard going from playing six days a week for three hours a day to once a week for 12 weeks a year,” Perron said. “You realize how old you’ve gotten – no hands, no lungs, no legs. I’m sure I’ll hate myself after the first few times, but it will be fun.”

Dominguez, a faculty member at CSUSM since 2011, is being honored for Outstanding Technical Achievement. He is one of 27 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals selected to receive a HENAAC Award. Winners will be honored at the 28th Annual HENAAC Conference in Anaheim on October 5-9.

“Dr. Dominguez brings depth of research expertise to his department and the College of Science and Mathematics,” said Katherine Kantardjieff, dean of CSUSM’s College of Science and Mathematics. “He has quickly established an active, productive, externally funded, highly respected research program and has made unique technical advancements which will impact science for the foreseeable future. He also actively engages undergraduate students, largely underrepresented and Hispanic, in the work.”

Dominguez has previously been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, NASA and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as a top researcher in planetary astrophysics and atmospheric chemistry.

Dominguez earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. His awards and recognition include earning a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellowship, a NASA Group Achievement Award and the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences. He also was named an Emerging Scholar by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

He currently is conducting research on the isotopic composition of molecular clouds to understand how the sun and the planets of our solar system were formed. He is also conducting research in the application of nano-optical techniques for mapping the chemical composition of primitive planetary materials such as meteorites and cometary dust grains.

Great Minds in STEM is a non-profit organization dedicated to keeping America technologically strong by promoting STEM careers, especially in underserved communities. The organization’s nationwide programming focuses on STEM educational awareness from kindergarten through college, and on seeking out and documenting the world-class contributions of Hispanic professionals in STEM to serve as role models for the next generation of American engineers and scientists.

About California State University San Marcos

Building on an innovative 26-year history, California State University San Marcos is a forward-focused institution, dedicated to preparing future leaders, building great communities and solving critical issues. Located on a 304-acre hillside overlooking the City of San Marcos, it is the only public four-year comprehensive university serving North San Diego, Southwest Riverside and South Orange Counties.

The University enrolls over 14,000 students. With approximately 2,000 employees, the institution is a Great College to Work For® (The Chronicle of Higher Education). As a recipient of the annual HEED Award since 2014 — a national honor recognizing U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion — CSUSM is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment.

The Robot Expo showcases original robots constructed by teams of physics and computer science students who are tasked with designing and programming a micro-system. Each robot requires hours upon hours of thought, research and advanced code, effectively engaging the students’ knowledge and ability to create a fully functioning robot from scratch. The expo gives students a chance to showcase their robots in action as well as communicate the technical processes the robot undergoes to perform those tasks.

The community is encouraged to join in the fun and watch robots in action. Physics demonstrations, including a showcase of the use of 3D printing to build prosthetics, and interactive activity stations led by STEM ambassadors and the Society of Physics students will also be offered at the event, allowing attendees to engage in a hands-on experience.

What: Robot Expo hosted by the CSUSM Physics Department

When: Friday, Dec. 18, 2015 – noon to 3 p.m.

Where: The McMahan House at CSUSM, 333 S. Twin Oak Valley Road, San Marcos

Directions and Parking: For more information or directions to the campus, visit http://www.csusm.edu/guide. Parking is available in campus lots with fees ranging from $4 to $9 depending upon length of stay.

Previously, scientists have used techniques for analyzing the elemental and structural characterization of samples smaller than a nanometer—a billionth of a meter—but infrared spectral mapping of geochemical samples at vibrational “fingerprint” wavelengths has remained limited to spatial scales larger than ten microns—about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair. This new discovery, as illustrated in the article titled, “Nanoscale infrared spectroscopy as a non-destructive probe of extraterrestrial samples,” inaugurates a new era of infrared nano-spectroscopy related to very small extraterrestrial samples.

Dominguez is excited about the potential of these new techniques particularly for the study of lunar rocks, cometary particles, meteorites and interstellar dust, because these rare extraterrestrial materials have a molecular diversity that is difficult to determine on the nanoscale in a non-destructive manner. A better understanding of the makeup of these objects could provide clues to the formation of the planets and solar system.

“The ability to quantitatively study the distribution of molecules in primitive extraterrestrial samples with spatial resolutions that are much smaller than a micron will provide us with an unprecedented level of insight into their alteration history and evolution,” said Dominguez. “This work represents the culmination of several years of hard work by our talented research team. Together with our collaborators, we look forward to applying this technique to study other interesting and unique samples including dust from supernovae explosions and interstellar dust.”

This research was supported by NASA’s Sample Return Instrument Development and Analysis Program (SRLIDAP) grant NNX11AF24G.

To read the article, visit: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141209/ncomms6445/full/ncomms6445.html

Applied physics is one of the fastest growing degree programs at CSUSM.

“Students majoring in physics stand out and are highly valued in regional industries based in defense, programming, healthcare and engineering because of the hands-on experiences and mentorship they receive from faculty,” said College of Science and Mathematics Dean Katherine Kantardjieff.

Dr. Stephen Tsui says the new space will allow him to take his work and mentorship of students to the next level. He is looking forward to expanding his research into nanoparticles, which requires use of a fume hood that he didn't have prior to the renovations.

“Over the years Hunter Industries has been a significant corporate supporter of our athletics and business programs,” said Vice President for Advancement Neal Hoss. “The company’s recent generosity enhances our reputation as an institute for experiential learning, for innovation and for creating learning spaces that both foster and enable student discovery.”

Greg Hunter, president of Hunter Industries, said, “We are proud to be partners with CSUSM, a vital educational institution in our region, and hope that we can inspire others to step forward and support the College of Science and Mathematics.”

Physics Undergraduates Lead Cutting-Edge Research

From leading astrophysical research that may explain the creation of Earth, to delving into nanostructures that could transform the future of data memory, the cutting-edge research experiences that CSUSM physics undergraduates receive are unparalleled and unique.

Working in the state-of-the-art laboratories generously funded by Hunter Industries, CSUSM physics undergraduates conduct original hands-on research alongside our esteemed faculty. In the lab students gain competitive skills that outshine their collegiate peers and prepare our graduates to solve the challenges of tomorrow.

Learn more about CSUSM's hands-on approach to physics by visiting www.csusm.edu/physics.

Applied physics is one of the fastest growing degree programs at CSUSM.

“Students majoring in physics stand out and are highly valued in regional industries based in defense, programming, healthcare and engineering because of the hands-on experiences and mentorship they receive from faculty,” said College of Science and Mathematics Dean Katherine Kantardjieff.

Dr. Stephen Tsui says the new space will allow him to take his work and mentorship of students to the next level. He is looking forward to expanding his research into nanoparticles, which requires use of a fume hood that he didn't have prior to the renovations.

“Over the years Hunter Industries has been a significant corporate supporter of our athletics and business programs,” said Vice President for Advancement Neal Hoss. “The company’s recent generosity enhances our reputation as an institute for experiential learning, for innovation and for creating learning spaces that both foster and enable student discovery.”

Greg Hunter, president of Hunter Industries, said, “We are proud to be partners with CSUSM, a vital educational institution in our region, and hope that we can inspire others to step forward and support the College of Science and Mathematics.”

Physics Undergraduates Lead Cutting-Edge Research

From leading astrophysical research that may explain the creation of Earth, to delving into nanostructures that could transform the future of data memory, the cutting-edge research experiences that CSUSM physics undergraduates receive are unparalleled and unique.

Working in the state-of-the-art laboratories generously funded by Hunter Industries, CSUSM physics undergraduates conduct original hands-on research alongside our esteemed faculty. In the lab students gain competitive skills that outshine their collegiate peers and prepare our graduates to solve the challenges of tomorrow.

Learn more about CSUSM's hands-on approach to physics by visiting www.csusm.edu/physics.