Today's Globe and Mail has my profile of Mike Thewalt, a physicist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Thewalt's a neat guy and his work on the spectroscopy of silicon helped him get the nod as Canada's physicist of the year:
Physicist of the year
Mike Thewalt started out fiddling around with chemistry, but after almost blowing himself up when he was 16, he switched disciplines. It was a good move. His insights into silicon are causing a buzz.
BURNABY, B.C. — Thirty-eight years after he blew up his basement bedroom fiddling with a German chemistry kit, Mike Thewalt scratches his head, grins and tries to explain the wonders of isotopically pure silicon.
Dr. Thewalt is, by trade, an experimental physicist and, by rank, a professor in the physics department at Simon Fraser University. He has been fiddling around for years now with silicon, the world's most common semiconductor.
In fact, he's so good at fiddling around that he is the 2004 winner of the Canadian Association of Physics Medal of Honour, a kind of MVP award for the country's physics establishment ….[Read the full story]
The print version of the story has a great picture of Thewalt in his lab at SFU. It's taken by John Lehmann, who is one of my favourite photographers when it comes to shooting profile shots. Sadly, the article and photo are not on a colour page in the paper (despite advances in newsprint printing technology, they're still rare and expensive) but I suspect what John saw was an even stronger version than what ended up running.