James P. Sethna is a professor of physics at Cornell University, specializing in condensed matter theory (he develops theories not about elementary particles or black holes, but about things you can touch). He's had the pleasure of working with sixteen graduate students, who have gone on to work at some great places (doing physics, finance, raising kids, defending the environment...)
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna

Karin A. Dahmen is a new assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, coming there from a Junior Fellow position at Harvard. Professor Dahmen received her Vordiplom in physics from the Universitaet Bonn, Germany, in 1989, and her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1995. She has wide-ranging interests in "soft" condensed matter physics, including nonequilibrium dynamical systems, hysteresis, avalanches, earthquakes, population biology, and disorder-induced critical behavior.
http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/People/Faculty/profiles/Dahmen/

Christopher R. Myers is a senior researcher at the Cornell Theory Center, with a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell and a bachelors degree in History from Yale. For many years, he has snaked along the interface of science and computing, seeking to develop expressive software environments to enable creative scientific research, and to use those environments to unravel complexity in physical, material and geological systems.
http://www.tc.cornell.edu/~myers/