Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky needs a room that doesn’t move. At all.

Inside the room, she moves particles that are 1000th the diameter of a hair. Just like the children’s toy Wooly Willy in which a magnet clusters small magnetic pieces over a paper man’s face, the nanoparticles she manipulates could one day be steered through the human body to target drug delivery. With this kind of delivery, patients could see fewer side effects and more healing.

The West Virginia University physicist has new digs in a solid, stone building now that the nearly $35 million White Hall renovation is finished. Her lab, complete with a 12-by-6 foot vacuum chamber to hold the nanoparticles, has centrally chilled water, minimal vibrations, vacuum pump exhaust lines and electrical outlets in all the right places.

You’d think every research lab would have these features, but she’s seen places where exhaust is funneled out the window.

“This is the nicest building I have ever worked in,” she said. “We got to design the labs to be exactly what we wanted, so for the first time in my 20-year professional career, I actually have the storage space I need.”

WVU is officially marking the opening of White Hall as the new home of the Department of Physics with a celebration at 3 p.m. Friday. The building opened for classes in January.

Leslie-Pelecky is one of the newer faculty members in a department that’s seeing dramatic growth in research activity and the number of undergraduate students. For one department, the range of faculty research is diverse.

Some researchers are partnering in a national project to develop hydrogen fusion energy. Others make observations at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va.

Still others are trying to make electronics smaller, confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity and develop new ways of using lasers to probe the matter at the nanoscale.

When they’re not performing research, the faculty teach in a program whose undergraduate majors have doubled in size over the last five years. The physics department also draws in youth from across the country who help to search for pulsars and sponsors high school students in Morgantown in a nationally successful robotics program.

For the last two decades, faculty in Physics worked out of old closets and storerooms. Most of the professors didn’t have windows in their offices. Some of the graduate students worked in buildings other than physics’ old home of Hodges Hall.

White Hall, built during World War II, is actually smaller than Hodges Hall. But while keeping plenty of space to accommodate the physics classrooms, provide outlets and chairs for studying, and chalkboards for impromptu calculations, White Hall has more research space that is easily accessed by faculty and their students. Graduate students have offices as well and the building is designed to encourage people to meet in the hallway and discuss ideas.

The space also tells everyone what’s important at WVU.

Doctoral student Matthew Galante is working with department chair Professor Earl Scime to develop a laser diagnostic tool useful in the quest for hydrogen fusion energy. He knew he wanted to work in plasma physics, and saw an opportunity for hands-on involvement at WVU.

“Working for Earl is probably the best thing I’ve ever done because I get to do exactly what I wanted to do for the past 10 years,” he said.

He’s enjoyed working in a space that isn’t cramped and where safety precautions are now as simple as turning on the “keep out” sign.

But best of all, the department is bringing in high-quality professors producing good and important work that’s getting noticed around the country.

“The University has really taken note of the type of work that goes on here and the quality of the work that is produced by the department,” Galante said. “They wanted to invest money in giving us new space where the level of work can only increase.”

“We have a strong department here that I think produces top end physicists, who do great work while they’re here and then go on to do great work when they leave. The best thing that a University can do is produce scientists who know how to do good work.”

-WVU-

dm/04/10/12

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