70th Birthday Celebrations for Two Professors

Both turned 70 earlier this year.

Melissinos: Studying the universe

A former Royal Hellenic Navy officer who was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Adrian Melissinos earned his Ph.D. in 1958 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He immediately thereafter joined the University, where he has since studied a gamut of questions about the nature of the universe, among them the case of the missing matter.

Physicists can account for only a small fraction of the material that their theories say must exist in the universe, so the hunt is on for the rest, the famous "missing mass." Candidates for the role include axions, very light particles that barely interact with normal matter. The series of experiments on axions that Melissinos led at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the early '90s was one of the most exhaustive searches ever for dark matter. It has helped physicists narrow down the properties that the hypothetical particles can have.

More recently, Melissinos earned headlines around the world for the results of an innovative experiment in which his team brought together high-energy electrons produced by Stanford's two-mile-long accelerator, which travel near the speed of light, and photons from a powerful "tabletop terawatt" glass laser developed at Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics. By dumping an incredible amount of power--nearly as much as it takes to run the entire nation but lasting only a tiny fraction of a second--into an area less than one billionth of a square centimeter, the team created particles of matter from pure light.

A fellow of the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Athens, Melissinos has been a visiting scientist at a number of laboratories and universities around the world and has to his credit more than 150 publications, among them four textbooks and several monographs. His book on experimental physics has become a classic--a standard used in almost all undergraduate and graduate laboratory physics courses around the world.

To explain his fascination with his work, Melissinos says simply, "I love the joy of discovery, and of sharing that discovery with others."

Oi: Helping shape national policy

Known to many as the man who helped to end the military draft, Walter Oi is the University's Elmer B. Milliman Professor of Economics. A member of the faculty since 1967, he was chair of the economics department from 1976 to 1982.

His research on employment, wages, prices, the economics of health and safety, and the effects of disabilities have earned him international recognition and broad scholarly acclaim.

It was when he was serving as staff economist for the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force that Oi helped persuade the Nixon administration and Congress to end the draft in the early 1970s. His analysis of the unseen costs of military conscription is credited with playing an important role in crystallizing the debate that led to the adoption of an all-volunteer military.

In reflecting on those times, Oi likes to point out that the commission was truly a Rochester operation, with W. Allen Wallis, then University president, lobbying Richard Nixon and his advisors for the all-volunteer force. Before Nixon was sworn in, Wallis asked William H. Meckling, then dean of the University's graduate school of management, to assemble a research team with Oi as one of its members. In less than 10 days, the team prepared a position paper that developed a plan to end conscription. The idea for a presidential commission grew out of that position paper.

Oi's influence on U.S. public policy continued in later years during his service as vice chair of the President's Commission on Employment of People with Disabilities. He also worked as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the National Commission on State and Workmen's Compensation Laws.

In 1993, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Two years later, he was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association for his intellectual achievements and contributions to the field. He also is a fellow of the Econometrics Society.

Before joining the Rochester faculty, Oi taught at the University of Washington, Northwestern University, and Iowa State University. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago.

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