{"id":88524,"date":"2014-01-27T08:44:45","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T13:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=88524"},"modified":"2014-02-11T11:53:37","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T16:53:37","slug":"laser-physicist-nora-berrah-joins-uconn-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/01\/laser-physicist-nora-berrah-joins-uconn-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Laser Physicist Nora Berrah Joins UConn Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Norah<\/a>
Norah Berrah, professor and head of the department of physics, is an internationally known researcher and advocate for women in STEM fields. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences welcomed its new head, Professor Nora Berrah, to Storrs this week. Berrah brings to UConn an international reputation as an accomplished atomic, molecular, and optical physicist, along with a passion for showing students of all ages, especially women and minorities, that physics is an accessible and exciting field.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a myth that physics is hard. It\u2019s a welcoming field that is fun and exciting,\u201d says Berrah, who joins UConn from Western Michigan University, where she was a Distinguished University Professor. \u201cIt\u2019s like opening up a door to a world you never knew existed. What could be better than understanding what\u2019s around you and how things work?\u201d<\/p>\n

Physics for the people<\/b><\/p>\n

From a young age, Berrah, who grew up in Algeria and attended the Universit\u00e9 d\u2019Alger, says she had a keen curiosity for the sciences. In her school system, students were exposed to specific disciplines like physics as early as middle school.<\/p>\n

Because of this early exposure, and because of the early 20th-century physicist Marie Curie\u2019s influence as a Nobel Prize winner, Berrah says that French-speaking countries have one of the highest percentages of women in physics in the world. Matching these outcomes in the U.S. is one of Berrah\u2019s lifelong goals.<\/p>\n

A 2013 report by the American Institute of Physics revealed that in the U.S., 14 percent of college and university tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty positions in physics are held by women, and only eight percent of senior, or \u201cfull,\u201d professors are women.<\/p>\n

As chair of the national American Physical Society (APS) Committee on the Status of Women in Physics in 2007-08, Berrah led a workshop that convened more than 50 heads of physics departments from U.S. universities and national laboratories to produce a report and recommendations<\/a> to increase the number of women in physics.<\/p>\n

The workshop concluded that women need to be recruited into physics early in life, retained in the field through mentorship and other encouragement, and rewarded with promotions at the same rate as men.<\/p>\n

The crucial first step, Berrah says, is exposing girls to STEM fields from a young age. Berrah herself has spoken in U.S. high schools and mentored women across the world, in Sweden, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow are you going to know if you like physics if you\u2019ve never been exposed to it?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Beyond Star Wars<\/b><\/p>\n

Berrah\u2019s own research in atomic, molecular, and optical physics concerns the interactions of matter with light. Using lasers \u2013 like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at Stanford University, the most powerful x-ray laser in the world \u2013 Berrah\u2019s research explores what happens deep inside molecules and nanosystems when exposed to ultra-intense beams of light.<\/p>\n

For example, in some of her research, Berrah and her colleagues study thymine, a component of DNA that helps to protect skin from sunburn. Using ultrafast laser light to probe how thymine absorbs ultraviolet radiation can help scientists understand the time scale of its natural sunscreen-like properties.<\/p>\n

A Fellow of the APS, she received the Society\u2019s 2014 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics<\/a> \u201cfor pioneering experiments on the interaction of atoms, molecules, negative ions, and clusters with ionizing vacuum ultraviolet and soft x-ray photons.\u201d<\/p>\n

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences dean Jeremy Teitelbaum is especially proud to have Berrah at UConn.<\/p>\n

\u201cNora is a national expert in laser physics and has been an effective advocate for women in physics and in science more broadly,\u201d says Teitelbaum. \u201cI look forward to working with her to build a stronger and more diverse physics department at UConn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Physics for success<\/b><\/p>\n

As a teacher, Berrah impresses upon her students that physics is a gateway to an exciting, fulfilling, and successful career. People who study physics can work not only in various industries and in education, but even in health care and financial and business fields such as investment banking.<\/p>\n

For her own part, Berrah came to UConn because she was inspired by a state that had invested so many resources in higher education, in initiatives such as Next Generation Connecticut.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to be part of the University in a state that values education and excellence in advancing the STEM fields and that is funding the University at the level it promised,\u201d she says. \u201cThey don\u2019t just pay lip service to education. They really believe in it, since they are doing it. It\u2019s exciting to be part of this enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

As department head, she hopes to continue to grow UConn\u2019s physics program.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to continue to recruit excellent students and hire excellent faculty who do excellent science,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Berrah plans to collaborate with the group of atomic and molecular physicists at UConn, and also with researchers in chemistry, engineering, and biology. But she acknowledges that no matter how much work scientists do, it will never be enough to understand the many puzzles nature has in store.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more I know about physics, the more I realize that a lifetime isn\u2019t enough to know all there is to know about it,\u201d Berrah says.<\/p>\n

Read a summary of Berrah\u2019s January 2014 article in Scientific American, <\/i>\u2018The Ultimate X-Ray Machine\u2019 here<\/a>. A subscription is required to read the full article, however readers in the UConn domain can access the journal article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Berrah, an internationally known researcher and advocate for women in STEM fields, is the new head of the physics department.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":88722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-88524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-11 02:40:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88524"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88750,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88524\/revisions\/88750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/88722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88524"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=88524"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=88524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}