SCSU Adds Applied Physics

Southern Connecticut State University will offer a master’s degree in applied physics beginning next fall, after the Connecticut Board of Regents for Higher Education approved the program Tuesday.

The degree will offer two tracks: optics and optical instrumentation, and materials science and nanotechnology. Both fields will help boost local students’ chances at scoring jobs in Connecticut’s high-tech sector, university officials said.

Students in the program will study both fields as well as get a taste of the business side of science because of the collaboration between Southern’s business school and its departments of physics, chemistry and computer science. Christine Broadbridge (at right in the picture), chair of the university’s physics department, said the combination will be a boon for students — and the state’s technology sector.

“This is really great for them, because we think of optics as being an established technology in Connecticut and nanotechnology and materials science as being an emerging technology,” she said. ​“For them to be able to get both of those backgrounds is really powerful.”

Optical instrumentation is crucial to a wide array of industries, from defense contractors to medical-device makers. Nanotechnology — the science of the very, very small — is increasingly prized for materials applications from tiny computer chips to ultra-targeted medical treatments.

The business-school component is also important, Broadbridge said, in giving students not just a solid background in the science, but the entrepreneurial skills to take a discovery from the lab and turn it into a commercially viable product.

Broadbridge pointed to United Technologies Corp. as a big Connecticut company that has excelled at both research and development and creating commercial applications. Southern is already placing graduates at similar companies, big and small, around the state, and the new degree program should expand that pipeline, she said.

“If you have people that have a full range of abilities,” she said. ​“That can really expedite things.”

The applied physics degree program is part of a larger effort at Southern to bolster science programs that prepare students for jobs in Connecticut. Southern is already the home base for the state university system’s new nanotechnology center. A four-course graduate certificate program in nanotechnology kicked off last summer, and the new master’s program will be another piece.

Physics professor Elliott Horch will coordinate the graduate program.

The university is using a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to buy equipment and fund other parts of the new offerings. Southern and Yale University are also partners in the Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena, or CRISP, which got a six-year, $13.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation this fall. Southern’s share of that grant is nearly $2 million.

Southern’s program will be only the second graduate program in applied physics in the state. The other is at Yale, where the focus is more on the track to a Ph.D. While Southern’s orientation is more toward industry, the collaboration between the two schools is well-cemented and growing, Broadbridge said.

“I think they’re just ideally complementary,” she said of the two schools’ offerings. ​“Many of our students will take this program and then go on to a Ph.D. program, and then many students then go on into industry.”