I'm Rob Roeder, Professor Emeritus of Physics and holder of the Lazenby Chair in Physics from 1983 until 2003. Usually when I was not lecturing or in the lab - room 116 - I was banging away on my computer to reduce some solar ultraviolet data.

For some interesting info., check out:

• SUMPAS (Solar Ultraviolet Monitoring Program at Southwestern)
• The physics department homepage

    I was born in Stratford, Ontario - now well-known for its  Shakespearean Festival - in 1937, about 20 years before the festival was founded.  From 1955 until 1959 I attended  McMaster University in Hamilton where I majored in Physics, made Honors, and was a member of the university's COTC contingent.  During the summer of 1958 I served in Germany as a brand-new Second Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals, attached to the Headquarters of the First Canandian Infantry Brigade near  Soest.  Among the lessons I learned during that time was the ease with which a major war could start by accident.
    By the fall of 1960, I had earned an M.S. in Low Temperature Physics at "Mac", transferred to the Canadian Army Supplemental Reserve as a Captain, and was on my way to the  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I received my Ph.D. in Astrophysics in 1963.  I had earlier celebrated passing my Ph.D. qualifying examination by getting married to Dagmar in December, 1961.  We have since raised two sons, and both now live in Austin.
    From Champaign I moved to Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario as an Assistant Profesor of Physics during 1963-64, but moved on to Toronto in the summer of 1964 to become an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Toronto.  While at Toronto, where I eventually became a Professor of Astronomy and Physics, I spent a lot of time with undergraduates on the eastern suburban campus and carried out research with graduate students on problems related to quasars and cosmology.  In 1971-72 I spent a year in Tucson, AZ at  Kitt Peak National Observatory and in 1979-80 a year in Austin at the University of Texas as a Visiting Professor at the Center for Theoretical Physics which was run, at that time, by Professor John Wheeler.  In 1983 I accepted the offer of the Lazenby Chair in Physics at Southwestern and have been here ever since.
    During my first decade at Southwestern, several undergraduates helped me with aspects of research in quasars; in particular, Ray Solanik (SU, 1985), Maria Gelabert (SU, 1988), and Taylor Goss(SU, 1991) deserve to be noted.  By 1994 my research interest had turned to the strength of solar ultraviolet radiation here in Georgetown and I began a long program to measure it (see  SUMPAS , above).  Students Andy Welch (SU, 1995) and Dennis Moore (SU, 1995) both helped get the project going and Kelly VanCamp (SU, 2000) did a time series analysis on data taken at the summer solstices of the years 1995 through 1999. More recently, Isaac Smith (SU, 2002) has computed the average winter peak ultaviolet irradiance at local noon at Georgetown for the winters of 1994-95 through 2001-02.  In the course of my career, I have written numerous lab manuals and been the author or co-author of more than 60 scientific papers which have appeared in The Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal, The Canadian Journal of Physics, The Journal of Geophysical Research, The Physical Review, and Nature. I retired from the faculty of Southwestern in the summer of 2003 after 20 years here, most of them as Chairman of the Department.