Stiliana Savin

Stiliana N. Savin, Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy, joined the faculty of Barnard in 2004 after teaching at Bryn Mawr College. At Barnard, she teaches courses and labs in mechanics and in electricity and magnetism. She is also Director of the Physics and Astronomy Laboratory.

Dr. Savin's research in experimental physics started at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Electronics and continued later at the "R & D" division of one of the largest Eastern European companies producing microelectronic devices. Then, during what she calls "a brief 'physics-free' period," Savin made good use of her undergraduate minor in journalism by working for a local newspaper in Bulgaria.

She came to the United States--and back to physics--as a graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia. There, the laser lab of Professor Marjatta Lyyra with its state-of-the-art equipment fascinated her. Dr. Savin says, "Learning to operate lasers and seeing the quantum mechanics of molecules in action was lots of fun." Her collaborative work on spectroscopy and dynamics of diatomic lithium molecules resulted in several papers.

After graduation, Dr. Savin's interest in molecular dynamics led her to the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University where she was a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of George McBane. There they "collided" supersonic beams of molecules in an apparatus that is one of the few of its kind in the world, and "probed" the resulting molecular states with a laser.