In our ongoing efforts to build and strengthen the Physics and Astronomy Department, we have appointed two highly regarded scientists to our faculty.
Visiting Professor Chiara Nappi has accepted the position of Full Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy as of January 2000. We are delighted to welcome this highly respected physicist to our faculty.
Dr. Nappi was born and educated in Naples, Italy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Naples and was invited for her post-doc work as a NATO fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Nappi was a lecturer at Harvard, before accepting a Radcliffe Fellowship at the University. She went on to Princeton as a Visiting Professor. She is also a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study.
As a Visiting Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at USC in the Fall of 1999, Dr. Nappi taught Physics for the Life Sciences (Physics 135) and found it to be a learning experience. She admits to being on the tough side in class, but says, "I expect the students to exhibit at least some of the commitment and dedication that I devote to the class." She worked to engage the students by linking physics concepts to specific medical applications (e.g. liquid pressure to blood pressure) for the predominantly pre-med class.
Dr. Nappi's research interests are extensive. She began her work in mathematical physics, which has helped her tremendously throughout her career. After her initial interest in constructive field theory and rigorous statistical mechanics, she worked on the skyrmion description of nucleons, at the interface of particle physics and nuclear physics. In the mid 1980's, she began her involvement in string theory, shifting her focus from particle phenomenology to string phenomenology. Since then, she has been working on low-energy effective actions for string theory such as Born-Infeld and Fierz-Pauli Lagrangians and their solutions. She also investigated the effects of boundaries and higher loops corrections on the string effective actions. In recent years, she has been particularly interested in black hole solutions, an interest grounded in her former work on two dimensional dilatonic gravity. She is currently studying the thermodynamics of black holes in string theory; in particular, the relation between the entropy of higher dimensional black holes and that of black holes in two dimensions.
Dr. Nappi is working with the Center for Theoretical Physics, a newly organized institute developed between the physics departments at Caltech and USC (for further information about the Center, please see page 8). She is very excited with the joint effort and is looking forward to collaborating with colleagues from Caltech and UCLA.
Dr. Nappi is married to Dr. Edward Witten, a physicist at Caltech, who recently lectured at the Center on the K Theory and its connection to branes in string theory. They have three children.
We are extremely pleased that Dr. Nappi has accepted the position of Full Professor and are looking forward to working with her.
Department of Physics & Astronomy / USC Physics & Astronomy Newsletters /