Please join us in welcoming Professor Steve Feller to Iowa City! Steve Feller is a professor in the Department of Physics at Coe College. He will present his research on new glasses on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 3:30 p.m. in 3505 SC. A small reception will be held beforehand at 3 p.m. in 3307 SC.

We are living in the Glassy Age of Materials chemistry, physics, and engineering. New glasses and their applications are manifold and are being put to many practical uses. Through rapid quenching and novel chemical routes we have created a niche of undergraduate research excellence in fabricating and studying new glasses. In this effort our students work four years on research and publish in journals of record in this field. Further, they give many talks, attend numerous conferences, and learn to make precise measurements and develop structure-property models using a raft of research-grade instrumentation. We graduate about 20 students per year, and two-thirds of them go on to graduate school in many areas, including modally engineering followed by physics. To date, 400 have worked on this project with many others doing research in other areas of physics. Most become co-authors of the journal papers.  Some examples of this work will be presented.

Steve Feller has been a physics professor at Coe College for over 45 years. During this time, he taught most courses in the undergraduate physics curriculum. His research is squarely with student colleagues and centers on the atomic structure and physical properties of glass. In this area, he has worked with about 400 undergraduates. With these students he has published over 180 papers in the refereed literature of the field. Also, he has edited a number of books on glass science. His students and he have given over 300 presentations at well over 150 national and international conferences. Funding from over 100 grants for over $10 million has been secured since 1983 from a large number of foundations, including the National Science Foundation. He has been married more than 53 years to Barbara. They have two daughters, Ray Feller and Heidi Berger, and four grandchildren. He has been honored a number of ways including being named, in 2003, Fellow of both the American Ceramic Society and the British Society of Glass Technology, Distinguished Iowa Scientist by the Iowa Academy of Sciences (1999), and Iowa Professor of the Year (1995) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Also, he was given the 1993 American Physical Society Prize to a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution. During spring and summer 1996 he served as a Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom where he did neutron scattering studies of glasses and crystals. In 2001 and 2006, he was visiting professor of physics at Sojo University (Japan) and University of Warwick (England). In 2011, he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Warwick.  In 2016, he was a visiting scientist at the Rutherford-Appleton Lab (UK), The University of Innsbruck (Austria) and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Athens). The 2017 International Borate Conference was held in his honor at Oxford University. He was especially gratified to have been awarded the C.J. Lynch Prize as Teacher of the Year by the 1993 senior class of Coe College. In 2011 he played the role of Niels Bohr in Coe's production of the West End and Broadway play Copenhagen.