How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
NYU hired three physicists as the first major recruitments of 'The Partners Fund,' an intensive five-year, $200-million initiative that will increase the Faculty of Arts and Science by 20 percent, university officials announced yesterday.
David Grier, David Pine and Paul Chaikin will lead a team of researchers in establishing NYU's Center for Soft Matter Research.
'The hiring of these distinguished physicists exemplifies our commitment to excel in the sciences,' Peter Lennie, NYU's dean for science, said in a statement released yesterday. 'We are assembling an unmatched group of scholars in a field that will be hugely important in 21st century physics.'
The three physicists are the first of eight faculty members to be recruited for the center, which will focus on soft condensed matter physics, a new discipline that deals with how complex natural structures are shaped by processes at the microscopic level.
Grier, who comes to NYU from the University of Chicago, invented holographic optical trapping, which allows scientists to manipulate objects as small as a few nanometers in size.
Pine, who was the chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies certain types of fluids and their practical applications.
Chaikin worked at Princeton University, where he specialized in particle physics.
