A Busy Year for Dr. Izaguirre
Kevin Thomas

This year in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has seen some major changes. Plans for new laboratories are in progress, many seniors are graduating, and the Department has welcomed two new full-time professors. I had a chance to sit down with one of these, Dr. Enrique Izaguirre, and talk about his first year teaching here and his goals for the future.

Dr. Izaguirre is very happy here at Sonoma State. “This place is great. I especially love to work with students,” he says. This is why he came here in the first place. He appreciates the diversity of interest among our students because it allows him to explore many different areas.

He is one of the driving forces behind the establishment of new labs on campus and the expansion of research programs in the Department. This, too, capitalizes on his love of teaching, for as he puts it, “Researching with students is fifty percent teaching.” Currently working with him are the Department’s Newkirk Award winner, Jeremy Hieb, the recipient of the Michael and Sheila McQuillen Summer Research Assistantship, John Collins, physics majors Viviane Pierre-Louis, Sarah Silva, Tiffany Borders, and Ashley Wiren, and chemistry major Nicole Petta.

Dr. Izaguirre’s research interests include biophotonics, the study of how biological agents and organisms interact with light, and biomolecular electronics, the use of biological materials to fabricate electronic circuits. “You can learn a lot from nature,” he proclaims, also pointing out that by their very nature, his research areas are heavily interdisciplinary.

He has already initiated collaborations with the Biology Department and Chemistry Department, and he’s working hard to encourage students from other disciplines to join the research groups. “The student mentality is ‘I can’t work with you if you’re not a professor from my department,’” he observes, a stereotype that he wishes to break. To help foster interdisciplinary cooperation, Dr. Izaguirre has given various lectures on campus, including one in the M*A*T*H colloquium series. But this professor’s educational outreach and recruiting extend beyond the borders of the campus. He has given talks on his research at community colleges and high schools to attract students to the SSU physics program.

Dr. Izaguirre’s innovation hasn’t just been with new research programs and collaborations. He brought his fresh knowledge of the fields with him and used it to update the department’s digital electronics and photonics classes. Many of the students are doing advanced projects and learning new techniques.

Dr. Izaguirre has also been busy fundraising. He was awarded a Mini-Grant from SSU’s Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Program (RSCAP) to fund his summer research project entitled: “Characterization and study of the self assembly of multi-component Langmuir-Blodgett films,” and a larger grant from the CSU Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology for next year. As he described it, “Most of the money is for the students, and that’s the important thing.”

Dr. Izaguirre hopes to have the new labs completed by the end of the summer so that by the fall semester, research can proceed at full speed when students return from break. Despite all that he does here at the school, he manages to find time to get out to the gym and explore the local area.