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Physics professor Frank Avignone joined USC’s faculty 40 years ago, but it will be another decade, he hopes, before you read about his retirement.
His remarkable career—still going strong at an age when many professors are planning their last lectures—has several notable numbers associated with it, including:
• more than 25 years of continuous funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)
• 19 years of service as chair of the physics and astronomy department (1979–98); 16 of the department’s 25 current faculty were appointed during that tenure
• about 240 scholarly articles published
• 16 Ph.D. graduates were under his tutelage, with four additional current graduate students.
In December, the University of Buenos Aires recognized Avignone’s contributions to particle astrophysics research by awarding him an honorary doctorate degree. The ceremony was more than pomp and circumstance: for the better part of an hour, faculty members there peppered him with questions—in Spanish—about his research.
Avignone savors the event, but points out that USC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy has several other “star” faculty in its ranks as evidenced by the state, national, and international recognition their research has attracted. Consider these numbers:
• six physics and astronomy faculty members have won international awards: Wolf Prize, Israel Prize for Exact Science, Cresson Medal of the Franklyn Institute, King’s Gold Medal in Science (Norway), Luis Leloir Medal (Argentina), and the Gravity Essay Award
• three have been recipients of U.S. Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Awards
• seven have received the USC Russell Research Award
• and two have received the S.C. Governor’s Awards in Science.
Several years ago Avignone was named a Carolina Endowed Professor of Research and devoted himself fully to particle astrophysics. He’s completing work on a $670,000 grant this spring and has two more grants, one of them a $1.7 million proposal, under consideration.
For years, Avignone has searched for cold dark matter and exotic nuclear double beta decay, which is the key to measuring the mass of a neutrino and, by extension, estimating the mass of the universe. He led the first terrestrial search in 1987 in a gold mine in South Dakota; the elusive search—physicists still haven’t found physical evidence of cold dark matter’s theoretical existence—now has become international in scope, and NSF and DOE are providing more funding for the efforts.
Avignone credits some of his long funding success to a brief stint at the Office of Naval Research, where he learned the process of how proposals were reviewed and ultimately funded. That knowledge helped in the late 1970s when he developed an EPSCoR proposal to recruit new faculty to the department.
“Three of our four research areas are now internationally known,” Avignone said. “Recently, nanoscience is key, but we have had strong talent in nuclear physics, particle astrophysics, high energy physics, and foundations of quantum theory.”
The septuagenarian professor has hit a few speed bumps in his long career. He recovered from an aggressive form of prostate cancer 10 years ago and had to give up running five miles a day at age 67, “when my knees couldn’t take it anymore,” he said.
But, all things considered, he thinks he has more productive years ahead. In the words of a famous physicist from long ago, things in motion tend to stay in motion.
2/05
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