U. nabs noted astrophysicist

Charles Alcock of Lawrence Livermore is rumored to be a future Nobel prize winner. Earlier this week, the University hired a senior astrophysics professor said to be a potential Nobel Prize winner, School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said. Charles Alcock, currently director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was hired as part of a recent effort to strengthen the Physics and Astronomy Department, officials in the department said. Widely published in theoretical astrophysics, Alcock -- the new Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics -- has also been conducting experimental searches for cosmic dark matter since 1989. His international experiment, the MACHO Project, has recorded images of over 20 million stars which indirectly show that at least some of the dark matter in the universe is composed of low-mass objects. This coming September, Alcock will arrive at the University, where he will operate out of the David Rittenhouse Laboratory and eventually teach both undergraduate- and graduate-level Astronomy and Astrophysics courses. Alcock, who last taught four years ago at the University of California at Berkeley and has not taught regularly since 1986, said he is eager to resume educating. "I'd like to start out teaching undergraduates," Alcock said. "You're catching people when their minds are really open -- in every sense of the word." At Penn, Alcock hopes to conduct a fundraising campaign for a 2.5-meter telescope to be deployed in Chile that would assist the MACHO experiment. "He is somebody who can make what he does accessible," said SAS Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences David Balamuth, also a Physics professor. "We are all delighted that Alcock has accepted our offer, and look forward to great things when he arrives on campus." Physics and Astronomy Department Chairperson Paul Langacker said Alcock's hire is a success for the astrophysics and astronomy group, which has been looking to hire continuously throughout the last decade. And he stressed that hiring Alcock was no easy chore. "I have been working on it for 14 months," Langacker said. Langacker said the department is now searching for a sixth person for the astrophysics and astronomy group, which is currently comprised of four junior faculty members and will ultimately have eight professors. A native of New Zealand, Alcock earned his doctoral degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1978 after studying at the University of Auckland. He served on the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and as an associate physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prior to joining Livermore as a physicist in 1986.