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James van Howe

Assistant Professor of Physics                             
bio
   Science, Rm 205
   Augustana College
   639 38th Street
   Rock Island, IL 61201
   (309) 794-3403

   jamesvanhowe@augustana.edu




Augustana College, 1996-1998. B.A., 2001, Physics, University of Chicago. M.S., 2005, Physics, Cornell University. Ph.D., 2007,
Physics, Cornell University. Assistant professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Augustana College, 2007-present.

I am excited to be back at Augustana after eleven years! I began my career as a physicist at Augie in 1996 but finished my undergraduate studies at University of Chicago in 2001. While at U of C, I helped perform research in Antarctica on a cosmic microwave background experiment named TopHat. In the fall of 2001, I began graduate school at Cornell University where I switched subfields and have been working on ultrafast optics ever since. My work in Chris Xu's Group at Cornell focused on leveraging fiber optic technology typically used for telecommunications in order to develop pulsed laser sources for biomedical imaging and other non-telecom applications.While at Cornell, I was fortunate to have authored more than twenty journal publications and conference proceedings as well as obtained three patents. 

At augustana I teach Physics 311: Electricity and Magnetism , Physics 350: Advanced Lab I , Physics 105: Acoustics, and Physics 103: Concepts of Physics, Physics 220: Introduction to Scientific Research, Physics 308: Electronics, and Physics 360: Optics.

I am also in the process of developing an optics lab at Augustana in collaboration with Professor Cecilia Vogel to continue research. To learn more about my work or why anyone might be interested in short laser pulses and optical nonlinearity please visit the Ultrafast and Nonlinear Optics Lab at Augustana (UNOLA) webpage.