Department Welcomes Two New Faculty Members

October 9, 2008

The Department extends a warm welcome to our two new faculty members: Assistant Professor Aran Garcia-Bellido and Assistant Professor Eric E. Mamajek.

Asst. Prof. Aran Garcia-BellidoAssistant Professor Garcia-Bellido studies the properties and interactions of the fundamental building blocks of matter. His research is primarily conducted at large particle accelerator facilities in Illinois and Geneva, Switzerland, where the experiments on which he collaborates study the production of new states of matter using the world's highest energy proton beams. His recent work focuses on searching to uncover new phenomena that must exist in order to complete the theory of the microphysical origins of mass.


Assistant Professor Mamajek comes to us from Harvard University, where he was the first Clay Postdoctoral Fellow to receive this prestigious fellowship directly out of graduate school. Mamajek is an observational astronomer, who works mostly at infrared, visible, and X-ray wavelengths, and who uses both ground-based and satellite observatories. Studies of the origins and evolution of stars, brown dwarfs, and planets occupy the center of his research activities.