Every Lawrence faculty member has an office, but only John Brandenberger, the Alice G. Chapman Professor of Physics, can lay claim to a palace. Brandenberger’s “Laser Palace,” as well as several other labs in Youngchild Hall, serves as a staging area for his teaching and research efforts in laser physics, saturation spectroscopy, time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy, and optovoltaic investigations — not to mention an impressive recruiting tool for future physics majors. The Palace also is the original model for the department’s “signature program” concept, a curricular initiative designed to bring specific, cutting-edge science to the undergraduate level.
With laser physics as the template, the physics department has since incorporated signature programs in computational physics and surface physics into the curriculum, with a fourth program in plasma physics forthcoming. Since joining the faculty in 1968, Brandenberger, in conjunction with his long-time colleague, Professor David M. Cook, has patiently shaped the physics program, providing vision, enthusiasm, and innovation to help transform it into what today is widely recognized as one of the best small-college physics programs in the nation, earning inclusion in the book Academic Excellence and, most recently, mention in a Physics Today article, “Why Many Undergraduate Physics Programs Are Good but Few Are Great.”
After more than three decades of mentoring students, Brandenberger experienced a case of role-reversal in May, when he spent a month at the Instituut voor Atom-en Moleculfysica (AMOLF) in Amsterdam, one of the Netherlands’ most prominent national laboratories, as a visiting scientist working in the laboratory of “femto” chemist Jennifer Herek, ’90, who spent the summer of 1989 on campus collaborating on research with him. Under Herek’s mentoring, Brandenberger worked on new techniques in laser spectroscopy involving quantum control, which embodies fundamental principles that have been of interest to him since his days as a doctoral candidate. While in the Netherlands, Brandenberger delivered a pair of lectures on multi-beam, multi-step laser spectroscopy, one at the University of Amsterdam and the other at AMOLF.
Read more about Professor Brandenberger
- "Grant expands 'signature' programs in physics."
- "Lawrence University physicist receives distinguished achievement award."
- "Improving physics at Lawrence," an article by professors Cook and Brandenberger from the Spring 1999 issue of Lawrence Today magazine.
View other faculty profiles from the president's annual report
