Hi, I am Arlette Baljon and currently the UG advisor. Please come to my office hours with questions; you can find them in the EAB system. https://studentsuccess.sdsu.edu/navigate-sdsu

I grew up in The Netherlands, where I obtained a masters degree in mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Utrecht. When I started in college about 4 students in a room of 200 or so were female. I got frustrated with the male dominated world (I still sometimes do) and after my junior year actually dropped out and spend 5 years or so doing other things before coming back to finish the degree. After that I was accepted in the PhD program at the University of Chicago. I actually had been thinking of specializing in the Philosophy of Science but realized that I am not a strong enough writer. I now enjoy talking to the philosophers here at SDSU and actually was asked to serve on one of their MS thesis committees. Mathematics comes very easy to me (my father used to show me off as a 3 year old) so a stuck with that. I spend 5 years in Chicago and 6 years doing postdocs in Baltimore and Ithaca. During that period all three of my children were born. They are grown up now, the oldest is an anthropologist specialized in human-computer interactions for health care applications. The middle one is an immune-engineering researching nanoparticle vaccines. The youngest just graduated from college and wants to go into public policy.

In the summer of 1999 I joined the physics faculty here at San Diego State University. At this moment, I enjoy working with an interdisciplinary group of biologists, engineers, and mathematicians on biophysical research topics (Viral Information Institute). In particular my group models mucus by means of large-scale computer simulations. Mucus is a temporary cross-linked polymeric network. Memory of deformations is stored in the sample’s topology and dynamics. Mucus plays an important role as part of an animal’s immune system. Most viruses, bacteria, and phages (viruses that kill bacteria) are located in mucosal surface. They all coevolve together. E.g. mucin-strands modify chemical groups on phages and bacteria remodel the mucus structure when moving through it. I am interested in this symbiosis between bacteria, phages and their host and the role of mucus in this process. Concretely we try to understand conditions that help phage cross the cell layers and their mucosal surfaces to enter the lymph system. Once phages are inside our bodies, they become part of the immune system and protect against sepsis.

My gateway drug into science was dinosaurs, terrifying yet safely long dead. But after I learned paleontologists spend their careers trudging through deserts or hanging off cliffs, I decided physics was more for me. While I worked hard, spending thousands of hours on math, physics, and programming, helpful mentors and good luck opened doors for me. While an undergraduate at UC Davis, I worked part-time at the campus cyclotron, which got me recruited by the nuclear theory group at the University of Washington for a Ph.D, and my adviser opened doors to postdocs at Caltech and Los Alamos. I was fortunate enough to get a faculty position at Louisiana State University, and, when my wife moved to San Diego for a job, even luckier to get a position here at SDSU. I didn’t spend all my time on physics: an early encounter with The Hobbit led to a lifelong interest in writing. At Davis I studied science fiction under Kim Stanley Robinson, who later won multiple Hugo awards and who still visits the honors course I teach on science fiction, and towards the end of my Ph.D I earned enough money in a science fiction contest to fund my first trip to Europe; in Baton Rouge I won money in poetry slams in bars. Since then I’ve become an accredited professional science fiction writer and member of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

These days I’m not writing much fiction or poetry, instead focusing on teaching and research involving the quantum physics of atomic nuclei and enormous supercomputers, as well as novel methods in quantum computing. I am grateful for the opportunity to open doors for my students, who often intern and eventually get jobs at national labs such as Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley. Networking in science is important and, frankly, part of the fun has been to make and meet friends and colleagues around the world, in Europe and Asia, and talk about physics and math and computing, and occasionally poetry, science fiction, or even dinosaurs.