Brighton Resident Named Head of RIT’s Department of Physics

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Mike Kotlarchyk

Brighton resident Mike Kotlarchyk was appointed as head of the Department of Physics in Rochester Institute of Technology’s College of Science.

He is an expert in radiation scattering as a tool for investigating structure and dynamics of condensed matter, with an emphasis on complex fluids. Kotlarchyk is co-author of the textbook Interactions of Photons and Neutrons with Matter, which has been used in graduate courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Michigan and RIT.

Kotlarchyk joined RIT in 1985 and became a full professor in 1996. He has been a visiting scientist at MIT and a guest research scientist at Brookhaven, Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories, as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research. He is also a standing proposal reviewer for NIST, a member of the executive board of the New York State Section of the American Physical Society and a recently designated Air Force Faculty Research Fellow.

Kotlarchyk earned his bachelor’s in physics, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in nuclear science/engineering and applied radiation physics at MIT.