A conference honoring physics professor Lee Riedinger will be held at The Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island, S.C., Feb. 25-27. Riedinger is the director of the UTK/ORNL Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, which will open this August.
Called “Waltzing to the Nuclear Limits,” the symposium will cover a wide variety of topics in nuclear structure with a focus on the extremes, including the limits of angular momentum and of binding and exotic topologies in nuclei far from stability. Organizers say Riedinger has played an important role in many of these areas, in both research and mentoring, and has enhanced nuclear physics with extensive service to the community.
Riedinger’s accomplishments range from a career in nuclear structure physics spanning over 40 years to scientific leadership, including his service to the nuclear physics community, the University of Tennessee and the nation.
“I met Lee in the early 1980s in the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark where he was a leading experimentalist carrying out basic investigations of rotating nuclei that were great triumphs of nuclear structure at that time,” said Physics Professor Witek Nazarewicz. “During the last 25 years or so, I saw many phases in Lee’s life: he was head of the Physics Department at UT Knoxville, director of the Science Alliance Center of Excellence, UT Knoxville’s associate vice chancellor for research and deputy director for science and technology at ORNL, just to name a few. In all those posts, he proved himself a gentleman and a scholar.”
For more information, visit http://www.phy.anl.gov/nuclearlimits2011/index.html.