STUDENT NEWS

Jeremy Callner

Physics PhD Student Jeremy Callner meets with Nobel Winners in Germany

Jeremy Callner was an accomplished jazz saxophonist before he decided to study high-energy nuclear physics.

His original idea was to "steal," as he puts it, an entire master’s degree’s worth of education from UIC. He would buy the books, go to class and "hope nobody noticed."

Callner completed the calculus sequence before he broke down and became a regular student. "In high school and well into my 20s I thought, ‘I may be too cool for science,’" he said.

But the experience of rooming with his cousin, Sam Hawkins, then a biology student at UIC, changed that. After playing jazz in clubs until the wee hours, Callner would get up at noon or so, about the time Sam was getting home from calculus class. "It sounded absolutely fabulous to me," he said, and he began showing up in classes as an unofficial student.

He is now on his way to a doctorate in physics. In July he returned from a meeting of students with Nobel Prize laureates in Lindau, Germany, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Callner attended 25 lectures by the Nobelists and "small group" discussions that weren’t that small—50 to 100 people.

The meeting "made me feel really empowered to be my own scientist," he said. "I learned you cannot stop doing what you’re doing because somebody else thinks you’re wrong. They may be right, but you have to find it out for yourself."

"I heard a lot of stories about people who made great discoveries that were dissented upon. The first assumption is, ‘I must have screwed up somewhere.’ But the kink in the graph is not a mistake, but rather a phase transition."

Curiosity about "the fabric of reality" draws Callner to high-energy nuclear physics. "It seems to me completely arbitrary that there should be matter, that there should be a universe," he said.

Callner is also a serious student of music. A tenor saxophonist, he spent two years at the University of Hartford under the tutelage of Jackie McLean, a former sideman with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Charles Mingus. He transferred to Roosevelt University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1998. While there, Callner won the Elmhurst Jazz Festival Soloist Award two years in a row.

After he and his wife (Caroline Engstler, a linguistics graduate student at Northwestern University) complete their PhDs, they plan to move to Europe, preferably to Germany. "It has to be a city with a jazz scene and jobs in physics," Callner said.

"There are not too many of those."

Adapted from a UIC News article by Gary Wisby, October 15, 2008.