‘The Energy of Light’ is focus for Oct. 28 Syracuse Symposium lecture

Award-winning physicist and materials scientist George Crabtree will present “The Energy of Light” Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium (Room 001) of the Life Sciences Complex. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is presented by Syracuse Symposium 2009: Light and the Department of Physics in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Parking is available for $3.50 in Booth Garage on Comstock Avenue.

Crabtree is a senior scientist, distinguished fellow and associate division director in the materials science division at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois. A pioneer in the development of magnetic flux imaging systems, Crabtree has won numerous awards for his research. He is the second recipient of the prestigious Kamerlingh Onnes Prize (2003), awarded once every three years, for his work on the physics of vortices in high-temperature superconductors.

Crabtree has twice won the University of Chicago Award for Distinguished Performance at Argonne and is a four-time recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Award for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Solid State Physics. Crabtree, the author of more than 350 scientific papers, has research interests that include materials science, sustainable energy, nanoscale superconductors and magnets, vortex matter in superconductors and highly correlated electrons in metals.

A fellow of the American Physical Society, Crabtree is also a charter member of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers in Physics and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating. The symposium is organized and presented for The College of Arts and Sciences by the SU Humanities Center.