K-State physicist Daniel Rolles elected American Physical Society Fellow
Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024
MANHATTAN — Daniel Rolles, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences at Kansas State University, has been elected a 2024 fellow of the American Physical Society.
The fellowship recognizes members who have made significant advances in physics through original research and publication or who have made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. Each year, no more than half of 1% of the society's members are elected as fellows.
Rolles was recognized for his pioneering experiments on imaging ultrafast molecular reactions with XUV and X-ray free-electron lasers, and for advancing the understanding of the interaction of ultra-intense X-ray pulses with atoms and molecules.
"Borrowing some baseball terminology from our Kansas City Royals, Dr. Rolles is a five-tool physicist, excelling in undergraduate and graduate teaching, service, engagement and world-class research," said Tim Bolton, head of the physics department. "It is wonderful to see that his scientific collaborators and peers have conferred upon him the honor of an APS fellowship."
Rolles' research in the James R. Macdonald Laboratory at K-State focuses on visualizing nuclear and electronic dynamics during photoionization and other photochemical reactions in gas-phase molecules by means of femtosecond pump-probe experiments. His research has been continuously funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation since he joined the department in 2015.
In addition to doing research, Rolles teaches introductory physics and graduate-level atomic and molecular physics and advises several graduate students.
"I feel very honored to have been nominated and elected as an APS Fellow," Rolles said. "I would like to share this honor with all of my current and former students and postdocs who have contributed to the various research projects that have led to this distinction. This is really a testament to the quality of the research done in the K-State physics department and at the J.R. Macdonald Lab."
Rolles received his master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Technische Universität Berlin in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Before coming to K-State, he had an Alexander-von-Humboldt Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellowship at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He was also a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute and a junior research group leader at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.
