Alumni Spotlight

Liza transferred to Sacramento State from UC Santa Cruz in 2002. She was a very active student - she took virtually every upper division course offered in the department and served as secretary and treasurer of the Society of Physics Students. She participated in research with two faculty members: experimental atomic spectroscopy with Dr. DeGraffenreid and theoretical modeling of a magnet falling inside a conducting tube with Dr. Partovi. She was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma (the National Physics Honor Society) and won the Outstanding Senior Award in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, as well as that for the entire College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Liza spent one summer as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a second summer at CERN. She was the first (and so far only) recipient of the Chien Hu Scholarship (for earning a 4.00 GPA in the physics curriculum at Sac State). Liza was also one of the first three students to earn a Certificate in Scientific Instrument Development.

Liza graduated in the Spring of 2005 and headed to Denmark as a Fulbright Fellow, where she attended classes and did research at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research project at the Danish Center for Membrane Physics involved using fluorescence and AFM images to study domain formation in ternary lipid-cholesterol mixtures. Having recently completed her fellowship, Liza is now working towards her Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Harvard.