INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

University of California, San Diego (U.C.S.D.) is one of the newest of the nine campuses which make up the University of California system. Other campues of the University of California are located in Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara.

The San Diego campus of the University of California overlooks the Pacific Ocean from a thousand-acre site in La Jolla. Torrey Pines State Park lies just north of the campus. To the south is San Diego, the second largest city on the West Coast. The Mexican border at Tijuana is thirty miles south of the campus. And beyond it stretches the isolated and beautiful sea coast of Baja California. Fifty miles to the east the Cuyamaca Mountains rise six thousand feet, and beyond them is the Anza-Borrego Desert. The climate is one of the finest in the world; winters are frost-free with little rain, and ocean breezes guarantee pleasant summers.

U.C.S.D. is recognized throughout the academic world both for the eminence of its faculty and for the quality of its graduate and undergraduate programs. U.C.S.D. has been able to achieve a stature comparable to that of institutions which were founded a century or more ago. At present U.C.S.D. has approximately 1,350 faculty members, 16,400 undergradute students and approximately 2,551 graduate students.

The Department of Physics was one of the first departments developed at U.C.S.D. and from its inception was counted among the leading departments in the country. The department includes 45 faculty members, 21 Emeritus faculty members, 7 Adjunct Professors, and 137 graduate students.

One of the important strengths of the department is the unusually broad range of research that it encompasses. There are substantial research groups working in the following areas: astrophysics and astronomy, biophysics, condensed matter physics, geophysics, nonlinear dynamics, plasma and controlled fusion physics, physics of elementary particle physics and physical oceanography.