"Overview of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University"
A brief overview of the Department of Physics and Astronomy will be presented to help facilitate faculty and students in their attempts to find points of intersection for new collaborations between Columbia University and Howard University. A departmental profile will be given along with a vignette of the various research specialties and activities by the faculty and graduate students within the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard.
Dr. Quinton L. Williams is Chair and Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University. His current research interest includes renewable energy with Li-ion batteries, nanomaterials, and photonics. Dr. Williams worked in industry at Lucent Technologies – Bell Laboratories in fiber optics and co-founded a venture capital-backed integrated optics company. He served as Chair of the Department of Physics, Atmospheric Sciences and Geoscience at Jackson State University where he was able to provide leadership to grow programs that were ultimately listed among the largest producers of African American graduates in both disciplines of physics and geoscience in the country. He has served on major national taskforces which have delivered seminal reports for increasing diversity in physics. As part of his life-long mission to educate, mentor and train underrepresented minority students in physics, he has directly supported and trained over thirty minority undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in his research laboratories at both JSU and Howard University. He served as President of the National Society of Black Physicists and was an elected member of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics. He recently was selected as part of the TEAM-UP Task Force to receive the American Physical Society’s 2022 Excellence in Physics Education Award. Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his B.S. degree in physics from Jackson State University.
Prof. Williams will be joined by the following members of the Howard University Physics Department for the Q&A session toi take place after the colloquium:
Prof. Prabhakar Misra (Director of Undergrad Studies, Physics)
Prof. Silvina Gatica (Director of Graduate Program, Physics)
Prof. Kim Lewis (Associate Dean for Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences)
Ms. Jaela Whitfield (President, Howard University Society of Physics Students)