Faculty & Staff
Faculty & Faculty Advisors
Dr. Erik Helgren
Professor of Physics and Chair
Solid State Physics
North Science 231
(510) 885-4604
Email | Website
Dr. Helgren is a Bay Area native having grown up in San Francisco. He attended UCLA, earning a B.S. in Physics in 1996, after which he spent a year working in Industry for Hughes/Raytheon Defense Systems in El Segundo, CA as a Systems Engineer. He continued with his graduate education at UCLA and focused on Condensed Matter Physics, specializing in microwave and millimeter-wave (or terahertz) spectroscopy techniques to study the electrodynamics of materials under the guidance of Dr. George Gruner and was awarded his doctorate in 2002. Dr. Helgren took a post-doctoral position at UCSD working with Drs. Frances Hellman and Bob Dynes in the Department of Physics and his research focused on magnetic semiconductor materials. He accepted a joint position as an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley & in the Materials Science Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and worked there until joining the faculty here at California State University East Bay.
Dr. Amy Furniss
Assistant Professor of Physics and Astrophysics
South Science 251
(510) 885-4634
Email | Website
Dr. Amy Furniss received her Physics PhD in 2013 from University of California in Santa Cruz. Starting with her PhD work. Dr. Furniss has been studying gamma-ray astrophysics, active galactic nuclei, blazar environments, evolution and emission, extragalactic background light, intergalactic magnetic fields, extragalactic cosmic ray and photon propagation, relativistic acceleration mechanisms and non-thermal emission processes. She studies these cosmological phenomena with significant help from her undergraduate research group at CSU East Bay, where students are able to contribute to the work through programming and analysis of both ground and space-based telescopes that observe the most extreme processes in the Universe.
Dr. Kathryn Grimm
Kathryn Grimm received her BS degree in Physics from UCLA. For her PhD she studied particle physics at Stony Brook University. Prior to coming to CSUEB Kathryn worked at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and was on the team that found evidence for the new particle the Higgs Boson. She is now studying the properties of the Higgs Boson, as well as searching for other new particles.
Dr. Derek Kimball
Professor of Physics
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
South Science 251
(510) 885-4634
Email | Website
Dr. Arran Phipps
Dr. Arran Phipps was born and raised in the Bay Area, originally from Fremont. After leaving high school as a junior, he attended Skyline Community College in San Bruno, CA and decided to pursue a career in physics. Dr. Phipps transferred to UC Berkely and completed a BA in Physics with honors in 2008. He then stayed at UC Berkeley for graduate school and was awarded his PhD in 2016 with a dissertation title of "Ionization Collection in Detectors of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search" under Prof. Bernard Sadoulet. Following graduate school, Dr. Phipps spent four years as a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Kent Irwin's group at Stanford University before joining Cal State East Bay in 2020. His research is focused on the design and operation of specialized detectors designed to search for interactions with hypothetical dark matter particles. Dr. Phipps is excited to work with CSUEB students on the development of new cryogenic amplifiers for particle-like dark matter and construction of a superconducting LC oscillator to search for wave-like dark matter.
Dr. Ryan Smith
Associate Professor of Physics
Ultrafast Optics, Solid State Physics
North Science 216
(510) 885-3448
Email | Website
Ryan Smith comes from the east coast, where he completed his B.S. in Physics in 2004 at Georgia Tech. His Ph.D. work at the University of Colorado involved using lasers to study the connection between quantum states of light and many-body electronic dynamics in semiconductor nanostructures. Dr. Smith spent a year in South Korea researching quantum dot solar cells, before coming to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow in the Materials Science Division. At Berkeley, Dr. Smith developed techniques and performed experiments in ultrafast optical and terahertz spectroscopy on nanostructure materials such as graphene and plasmonics. Dr. Smith joined the Physics Department at California State University East Bay in the fall of 2015 and is enthusiastic about engaging students in learning and research. Dr. Smith's research interests: enewable energy materials, ultrafast optics, spectroscopy from the terahertz to visible range, nanoscale phenomena, advanced laboratory education.
Lecturers
