Mark Loewe's scientific background

Mark Loewe graduated from El Modena High School in Orange, California, where he attended physics, chemistry, and mathematics courses taught by Mr. Ed Gaines, Mrs. Jeanne Carter, and Mr. Bill Ervin, respectively.  At the request of Mr. Gaines, Mark received credit during his Senior year as an in-class physics teaching assistant.

Mark graduated with Bachelor of Science degrees in Physics and Chemistry, Magna Cum Laude, from the University of California at Irvine, where he attended physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics courses taught by excellent professors, including Nobel Laureates Linus Pauling, Frederick Reines, and Mario Molina.  Mark was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his third year, completed six graduate level physics and chemistry courses, and was honored as the outstanding Senior graduating in Chemistry.  Mark worked for the Physics and Chemistry departments as a physics tutor, physics laboratory instructor, and chemistry research assistant.  During summers, Mark worked full-time at Hughes Aircraft Company.

Mark received offers to enter the physics doctoral programs at the University of Texas at Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and other universities.  Fellowship and other financial aid offers included a scholarship that John A. Wheeler chose Mark to receive.

Mark graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he learned from and collaborated with excellent physicists, especially his supervisor and mentor Arno Bohm and mentor Piotr Kielanowski.  Mark worked for the Physics Department as a research assistant and laboratory instructor and substitute lectured in lower-division, upper-division, and graduate level physics courses.

      University of Texas student comments

Mark coauthored, with Arno Bohm, Quantum mechanics: foundations and applications, 3rd edition, Springer-Verlag, New York 1993, which has been used by graduate students and researchers worldwide.  Softcover printings were published in New York in 2001 and in New Delhi in 2003.  A Russian translation of their 1986 edition was published in Moscow in 1990.  Unauthorized printings were made in South Korea and Communist China.

Mark coauthored research articles with physicists from Poland, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Egypt, Italy, India, and elsewhere.

Mark made scientific visits to West Germany, Poland, France, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.  Mark worked one summer as a scientific assistant to Karl Kraus at the Physics Institute, University of Wurzburg, and was funded for ten months by the German-American Fulbright-Kommission to do post-doctoral physics research at the Technical University of Clausthal.  Dr. Loewe was a guest of the Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University, and attended physics conferences at the University of Aix-Marseilles, TU Clausthal, and the University of Leipzig.  Dr. Loewe gave invited talks in Moscow and at the Institute for High Energy Physics, Protvino, Russia.

      The Moscow conference was hosted by the Nuclear Physics Department and the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the home institute of Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov, who was scheduled to give a plenary session talk.  The day after Sakharov's death, the conference Vice Chairman, Vladimir Man'ko of the Lebedev Institute, arrived in Clausthal and invited Dr. Loewe to give a plenary session talk.  Deeply humbled, Dr. Loewe requested, and was kindly allowed, to instead give a parallel session talk.

Dr. Loewe identified a continuous parameter that appears within a theoretical framework for the description of atomic hydrogen but which has never been fit to observed spectral and transition rate data.  Variation of this parameter away from a particular value for which certain matrix elements are zero could conceivably help to explain transitions and provide the simplest, most accurate fit to existing data.

Dr. Loewe was invited by Lawrence C. Biedenharn to collaborate on theoretical research on muon catalyzed fusion, which may be our most promising way to efficiently produce energy through controlled nuclear fusion.

Dr. Loewe taught lower-division, upper-division, and graduate level physics courses at Texas State University, San Marcos.

      Texas State University student comments

Dr. Loewe discovered that incorrect scores were issued to hundreds of thousands of students on Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) released Mathematics and Science tests.  Two questions on which Dr. Loewe discovered scoring mistakes are mentioned in "None Of the Above", by Lisa Guernsey, The New York Times, 24 April 2005.

Dr. Loewe did research and development in Texas' microelectronics industry, including research on the quantum mechanics of atomic diffusion in solid state systems, work on physical design of the POWER4 microprocessor and other computer chips, and work on low-density parity check (LDPC) codes for forward error correction.

Dr. Loewe contributed to the development of the Loewe^TM on-wheel pump, a miniature (less than 25 gram), magnetically-driven air compressor that is intended to maintain proper car tire pressure and, thereby, save hundreds of lives, tens-of-thousands of injuries, millions of tires, and billions of gallons of fuel per year in the United States.  When mounted on a rotating test wheel, examples of the Loewe^TM on-wheel pump have produced and maintained pressures high enough for passenger car tires with flow rates high enough to compensate for normal air leakage.  Engineers from a large automobile manufacturer recently attended a demonstration of the Loewe^TM on-wheel pump and requested examples to put under their tests.