David Hilton, Ph.D., has received notification on June 3rd from Dr. Ray L. Watts, President of UAB, on his promotion to associate professor and the award of tenure, in the Department of Physics effective October 1, 2013.

Dr. Hilton was award this promotion and tenure based on his excellence in teaching, research, and service and taking a leadership role in several collaborative efforts to enhance the scholarship of UAB. David's research program focuses on the nature of cooperative motion in condensed matter, including in the insulator-to-metal systems such as in vanadium dioxide, interstellar ices, Quantum Hall systems, and wide band gap semiconductors. His research group utilize a number of electrical, time-integrated optical, and ultrafast (terahertz)optical spectroscopic techniques to study the ground state and optically perturbed materials. Coherence is a property of quantum mechanics that could complicate the design of future electronic components, like computer processors, as designers continue to reduce the size of components to the quantum scale in an effort to make them operate more efficiently. In particular, his program seeks to develop novel applications to facilitate computation on the quantum scale.