Dateline recently sat down with Dean Winston Ko to talk about his aims and priorities for the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science.
Ko took up the post of dean July 1, succeeding Peter Rock. The division includes the departments of mathematics, statistics, geology, chemistry and physics. The longtime professor arrived on campus in 1970 as an assistant research physicist and lecturer. He was appointed to the faculty in 1972; and, from 1998 until this July, he served as chair of the physics department.
What do you hope to achieve in this post?
After 33 years at UC Davis I’m passsionate about it. I’d really like to see the division and the campus achieve national prominence, and I envision that — mathematical and physical sciences being fundamental to a great university — the division will take a central part in building this prominence. The division has made great strides in the last eight years under Dean Peter Rock’s leadership, and I hope to build on that foundation.
What are your priorities for the division?
I was here when we celebrated our 75th anniversary 20 years ago. At our centenary in 2008, we should be able to showcase our strong programs. We have great programs in the division literally ranging “between Heaven and Earth” (cosmology and geology) as well as interdisciplinary research initiatives, such as organic chemistry, which crosses into biomedical research.
Every department has been or will be asked for a new departmental plan — a vision of how they see themselves and how they are seen by the outside world. This will help us see where our strengths are and focus growth on key areas that we can showcase in 2008.
Campus initiatives will play an important role in building on strengths in the division and across campus, for example in areas such as computational science and nanotechnology.
Computational science is really the third leg of science — between theory and experiment. It’s an increasingly important area that we are focusing on through creation of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering, now headed up by John Rundle. We’re adding degree programs in computational sciences, for example, Computational Physics in the Applied Physics major, and Scientific Computing in Applied Math.
How does teaching physical sciences contribute to the community in general?
I’ve found that people from all kinds of jobs and backgrounds turn out to have degrees in physics, chemistry or the mathematical sciences. When you have a good background in these fundamental sciences, you’re trained in a way of thinking that is applicable to all kinds of jobs and disciplines.
I went to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the Carnegie philosophy, which I’ve tried to follow since, is that the most important parts of education are a strong background in fundamental subjects, such as physics, chemistry and math, and learning how to solve problems. It’s not just a matter of learning the facts — it’s a way of reasoning. That kind of broad education means that you can have more flexibility in your career.
On average, faculty in physical sciences teach three courses, typically one each at upper division, lower division and graduate level. Faculty in mathematics and statistics may teach a bit more depending on class size. The quality of lower division courses is fundamental to more advanced courses in science and engineering.
The growth in enrollment and the current budget situation is going to be a challenge and an opportunity for us. Because we’re teaching the big lower-division courses in science (math, chemistry, physics and statistics), our division sees the effects of enrollment growth before other colleges see the effect of it on their students.
What’s happening with your own research group?
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is poised for a great historic discovery: finding the Higgs boson, the field that is the origin of mass. That’s going to help us connect the smallest elementary particles to the Big Bang and the beginning of the universe. We’ve been involved in that project since day one, working on design and software.
It’s amazing that the very smallest particles and the very biggest structures in the cosmos are fundamentally related. I teach a freshman seminar in the subject, called “Inner Space, Outer Space,” which attracts great interest from students.
My lab joined the Large Hadron Collider project in 1992; it took five years to design, 10 years to build and it will be ready to start collecting data in 2007. Two research physicists from my lab are over in Switzerland working on the project.
The collider is definitely “big science” both in its aims and in the scale of the project. I think this is an irreversible trend: particle physicists are ahead in this trend because they are attacking very basic questions that need huge equipment, big detectors with very high precision. Because you are looking for very rare events, you need to collect vast amounts of data in these experiments and use very sophisticated software to mine the data.
What do you do to relax?
Outside work, I do a lot of hiking in the Sierra — I have a cabin at Lake Tahoe and I love to go up there to walk and relax.
I also involve myself in the Davis community. I’m an elder in the Davis Chinese Christian Church, which has many immigrants, Chinese scholars and students. Soon after coming to Davis, I sat on the Commit-tee of 100 to draft the city’s general plan, and I’ve been involved in various community sporting activities as you do when you have children, soccer referee and so on.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
I’ve been here 33 years; so if there are still things people would be surprised at, I’d be surprised!
I can tell you something about my family, though. I live with my wife of 34 years, Katy. We have two children, both grown up — our son is an architect, and our daughter is a graduate student at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.