A New Face in Physics
We are pleased to announce a wonderful new addition to Physics! Dr. Roxana Flacau, an experimentalist, received her B.S. degree in Physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1997. In 2007, she received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Ottawa, Canada, where she studied pressure-induced structural phase transitions using powder X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy. After graduate school, she spent three years as a post- doctoral fellow at the National Research Council of Canada, where she studied structural stability conditions for hydrogen-rich compounds with applications to hydrogen storage. Dr. Flacau later joined the Canadian Neutron Beam Center, Chalk River Laboratories, as an Instrument Scientist at the High-Resolution Neutron Powder Diffractometer beamline. There, she continued her work in the field of crystallography and phase transitions, with a focus on systems applicable to the nuclear industry and energy storage technologies. We were able to hire Dr. Flacau as a Senior Staff Lecturer in 2016 and could not be happier. Dr.
Flacau’s primary roles in the Department are to teach modernized versions of our introductory physics laboratories for majors, and help develop new and exciting experiments for next-generation labs. Rumor has it, though, that a lucky few physics or EP majors may also get a chance to do some exciting research with Dr. Flacau in the near future!