$20 SPS membership brings married undergraduate students to Jefferson Lab for research experience

The way Russell and Juliette Mammei see it, the $20 they each spend on annual Society of Physics Students (SPS) dues is well worth it.

Thanks to their SPS memberships at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and the support they get from their SPS chapter advisor and JLab bridged professor, Philip Cole, the married undergraduates spent most of this summer at JLab studying nuclear physics. They will use their research in their respective honors program senior theses. Russell worked for Hall B while Juliette delved into Hall C.

Juliette spent much of her time this summer working on Monte Carlo simulations -- a way of randomly generating events to test probabilities -- of the planned Hall C Super High Momentum Spectrometer (SHMS). "It is being designed for the proposed 12 GeV upgrade," she explains. "I've been plotting the resolutions from single-arm phase space simulations. I am currently working on the resolutions and count rates for exclusive p0 (pi zero) production."

Russell, on the other hand, has spent his time calibrating, or determining the resolution of, one of the detector systems in Hall B: the instrumented collimator. His efforts in calibrating the UTEP/Orsay instrumented collimator have allowed Hall B researchers to align the linearly polarized beam to within 50 microns. According to Phil Cole, Russell's work is quite an achievement and will increase the quality of data for the g8a run in Hall B.

Through SPS, Russell has already earned recognition for his academic excellence and leadership activities. He won a $1,000 SPS Leadership Scholarship for the 2001-2002 academic year; then went on to win the single $4,000 SPS Leadership Scholarship for 2002-2003 by taking first place at the national level.

Before transferring to UTEP, Juliette was a student at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, where she first became involved in SPS. After transferring, she found out about UTEP's SPS chapter and became involved there as well. Russell was enrolled at UTEP and heard about the trips offered through SPS and wanted to get involved. "I was told all I had to do was become a member," Russell recalled. So he paid his $20 and started looking for opportunities to broaden his physics experience. He was very excited about spending the summer at JLab. "That $20 SPS membership fee was more than worth it," he comments. "It's probably the best $20 I've ever spent!" The two students attribute much of their SPS chapter's growth and successes to the efforts of Cole. He was named the SPS Advisor of the Year in 2001-2002, which came with a $5,000 prize. And the UTEP chapter received the Outstanding Chapter Award for the same period.

Cole, previously with George Washington University, joined the UTEP physics department staff in September 1997. He'd been there only four months when a group of students approached him about becoming the advisor of the UTEP SPS chapter. Cole has planned trips for UTEP's SPS members, helped them get into Southeastern Universities Research Association universities to attend graduate school, and basically turned the chapter at UTEP around. In May of 2000 he hosted a four-day field trip to JLab for 17 UTEP SPS students.

"Dr. Cole is very generous with time, funding and support," Russell notes. "He is very active. If it weren't for him, our SPS chapter wouldn't be what it is today. He puts a lot of time and energy into it." "Dr. Cole is our inside connection," adds Juliette. "He is very helpful."

The Society of Physics Students has 700 chapters and 4,500 members nationwide. A big part of the SPS is its physics circuses. These circuses are used as an outreach program for all ages as well as to recruit for new members. SPS encourages a variety of activities and interests in addition to the sciences, including chapter basketball and soccer teams and community service projects.

The Society of Physics Students is a professional association designed for students to help transform them into contributing members of the science community by encouraging development of the skills they need to flourish professionally. SPS is an organization within the American Institute of Physics.

UTEP's SPS chapter is hosting the Zone 16 meeting (Arizona, New Mexico & west Texas) in October and Cole is certain his chapter will be recognized for its many accomplishments this year. At one point the UTEP chapter had only three members; it now boasts 20. The current chapter president and one of Cole's students who visited JLab in 2000, Mario Borunda, won a 2002-2003 Leadership award and is the new associate counselor for Zone 16. He is doing his nuclear physics honors senior thesis measuring the thickness of thin foils using an alpha particle beam with money the chapter won through an SPS undergraduate research award.

"These students have really worked hard to make our chapter one of the best in the country," Cole notes. For additional information, visit www.aip.org/education/sps/index.html.