ATWATER -- It was moving day for Anne Myers Kelley. Again.

The University of California at Merced physics professor had brought about half of her equipment when she arrived from Kansas State University in June. The second half came in December, and the eight movers were struggling to set up a laser table.

"It's always a pain moving," Kelley said, remaining chipper but nervous. "You have to have kind of a pioneering spirit to move in here."

That pioneering spirit did not extend to movers' plans to use a wooden pallet to turn the 12-foot-by-4-foot metal table on its side.

"I'm afraid a bunch of guys who don't know what they're doing would drop a 1,500-pound laser table and destroy all of my work," Kelley said. "And they'll end up amputating someone's foot.

"It's not like a lot of laser tables have been moved in the Central Valley."

Actually, she admitted, few people anywhere know how to move laser tables. "I've seen laser tables moved in a lot of scary ways."

Kelley and her husband, fellow spectroscopist David F. Kelley, were the first faculty members to arrive in Merced. They have set up offices and labs at Castle Airport Aviation and Development Center, where UC Merced has its temporary headquarters while the campus is built.

Since June, Kelley has set up half her lab, done some theoretical research into computer modeling, written a paper on the project and helped hire faculty.

"Every day is different. That's part of the attraction of this," Kelley said.

Spectroscopy is a branch of physics that studies light reflected off materials, sometimes down to the subatomic level.

Kelley zaps molecules with a variety of lasers and sees what happens. "The molecules change shape when they absorb light," she said, trying to boil a complicated science down to simple terms.

The table is used to anchor lasers and dampen vibrations from the ground, keeping the lasers from being jarred. A scientist does not want to be in the middle of an experiment and have a passing truck jiggle a laser out of alignment.

Small scale, big applications

Kelley's specialty is resonance Raman spectroscopy, which uses a microscope to zoom in on a sample. "It marries spectroscopy to a microscope system. With it, we can focus down to a small spot, maybe a micron in size."

That is tiny. A human hair, for example, is about 100 microns wide.

Kelley readily admitted that most people have not a clue about spectroscopy, but she stressed that it does have practical applications.

Some of her research is in electro-optic modulation, the same process that transforms voices into telephone signals that can be sent through fiber-optic cables. Crystals are used now, but they limit the speed of the signal, and they are hard to make.

"I'm working in plastics," Kelley explained. "Plastics are easy to cast into any size and shape very cheaply. The potential advantage is speed and cost."

Kelley is on the research end of the field. It is up to someone else to take her work and turn it into a better fiber-optic modem that gets sold to, say, Sprint or Comcast.

She is chairwoman of the Undergraduate Council for UC Merced, the group in charge of designing the curriculum for the majority of students.

"You don't have to make up everything from scratch," she said. But the faculty does want to make UC Merced unique among academic institutions, even at the undergraduate level.

Learning the theories of calculus without the real world of physics was tough even for Kelley. She leans toward the idea of teaching a combination physics-calculus class, although students probably would receive two separate grades.

"They have to get out of here with a transcript that makes sense," she said.