The Johns Hopkins University is a coeducational institution, comprised of eight divisions: the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (of which the Department is a part), the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering, the School of Medicine, the School of Hygiene and Public Health, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (in Washington, D.C., with centers in Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China), the Peabody Institute, the School of Continuing Studies and the School of Nursing. Also associated with the university is the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (located midway between Baltimore and Washington). The Space Telescope Science Institute, located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore, Md. (as is the P&A Department), serves as the ground base for the Hubble Space Telescope, a cooperative venture of NASA and the European Space Agency.

    The founding of The Johns Hopkins University, the first research university in the United States, in 1876, was made possible through a private endowment by Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore merchant. The original faculty consisted of six professors, including the physicist Henry A. Rowland.

    The early fame of the department rested on the work of Rowland, whose diffraction gratings revolutionized experimental spectroscopy. The tradition was continued by R.W. Wood, whose spectroscopic investigation contributed to the formulation of quantum mechanics. In recent times, members of the department have continued to make contributions to the frontiers of science. Faculty helped establish the "eight-fold way" of the elementary particle spectrum through the discovery of the eighth pseudoscalar meson, the *. They used data obtained from the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (operated by the first Hopkins astronaut in a space shuttle flight) to detect, for the first time, primordial intergalactic Helium. They have been among the most active users of the Hubble Space Telescope. They participated in the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment, leading to the completion of the third quark familyÑthe detection of the top quark.

    In 1990, the department moved to a newly constructed building, the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy. Bloomberg houses research laboratories and offices, as well as classrooms and teaching laboratories.

    The central role of research in the life of the Department of Physics and Astronomy can be traced back to the founding of the university. Guided by the faculty, each student makes his or her own decisions within a loosely knit but well-balanced graduate program, separate for physics and astrophysics. The aim is to give a basic training to every student while, at the same time, developing his or her critical scientific faculties.