Satinder Sidhu

Satinder Sidhu retired in 2015 after over a quarter century as one-half of the physics department at Washington College. He had started professional life with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the pioneer campus of India’s hyper-competitive institutes of technology. After seven years in a multinational electronics conglomerate, he turned to physics for the greater intellectual stimulation of fundamental science. After planting a foot in each of these two closely related disciplines with the help of a PhD in physics, he assiduously shrank from anything that felt even remotely like engineering. A five-year flirtation with particle accelerator physics at a U.S. national lab more-or-less fell into this category. Teaching across the full spectrum of undergraduate physics (plus some astronomy) did help him avoid the overspecialization he has always dreaded.