By Annemarie Gugelmann

In March of 2005, Elizabeth McCormack, Associate Professor of Physics at Bryn Mawr, was one of forty college and university senior faculty and administrators named an American Council on Education (ACE) fellow for 2005-06. ACE—one of the United States’ premier leadership-development programs since 1965—chooses fellows to prepare them to attain senior leadership positions in colleges and universities across the country. The program will train McCormack through various seminars and national meetings, including time working with a college or university president. According to the ACE website, the Fellows Program enables participants to immerse themselves in the culture, policies, and decision-making processes of another institution.

As a member of Project Kaleidoscope, a national program dedicated to building strong learning environments for undergraduate students in the sciences, and a professor at Bryn Mawr, McCormack strives to help students in the Physics world. “It’s hard to teach Intro Physics, and to find a prof who teaches it well is difficult,” said Christi Forsyth ‘07, a Physics major who has taken two classes with McCormack. “She’s a fabulous professor and really cares about her students.” Forsyth mentioned that McCormack went to Wellesley and that this helped her fit in perfectly at Bryn Mawr—an all-women environment. She graduated from Wellesley in 1983 and received her PhD in Physics at Yale University in 1989.

Active in academia around the world, McCormack has been teaching at Bryn Mawr since 1995. In the same year, she began studying as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Fellow at the University of Paris XI in Orsay, France. She is also an ERCOFTAC Guest Scientist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and has served as a physics curriculum consultant to Effat College, a new college for women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Of approximately 1,450 Fellows to date, nearly 300, roughly 21%, have served as chief executive officers at universities and colleges across the U.S. McCormack has not announced which university or college she will be working with under the Fellows Program. McCormack teaches both in the Physics graduate program at Bryn Mawr and at the undergraduate level.

Before teaching at Bryn Mawr, McCormack worked on the Laser Photophysics and Photochemistry program at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 1990 she was awarded an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship and by 1991 had earned permanent staff status at Argonne National Laboratory. She was promoted to the position of Physicist in 1993. She is a member of the American Physical Society, the Association for Women in Science, and the American Association for Physics Teachers. Her research interests include using techniques in nonlinear optical laser spectroscopy to study fundamental characteristics and excited state decay dynamics of atoms and small molecules.

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