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- Physics Grad Kate Miller Featured in Physics in Your Future APS Brochure
- Gravitational waves: U-M physicists involved in second detection
- The Hunt for Dark Matter Continues: PandaX Reaches World’s Best Sensitivity
- Stars Burning Strangely Make Life in the Multiverse More Likely
- Physics Professor Gordon Kane Awarded 2017 APS J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics
- U-M Astrophysicist Katherine Freese Explains the Search for the Universe’s ‘Dark Stars’
- New Dwarf Planet Solar System’s 2nd Most Distant
- Physicist David Gerdes and Team Find New Dwarf Planet In Our Solar System
- Professor Keith Riles – Member of LIGO Team
- Researchers Invent New Material that can Switch Between Being Hard and Soft
- The 2017 Physics Commencement Live Event
- Physics Professors Receive MURI Grant
- Alec Josaitis Recently Awarded International Institute and Rackham Graduate School Individual Research Fellowship
- Dr. Priyashree Roy Earns 2016 Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Thesis Prize
- LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time
- U-M Physics Alum Alex Nitz Helps Detect Colliding Black Holes in Space
- Professor Henriette Elvang Selected for a College of Literature, Science, and Arts John Dewey Award
- Professor Gordon Kane Quoted in "Yearning for New Physics at CERN, in a Post-Higgs Way"
- Professor Rachel Goldman and Team Develop Technique which Could Boost Efficiency of LED Lighting by 50 Percent and May Pave the Way for Invisibility Cloaking Devices
- Dark Energy Survey reveals most accurate measurement of dark matter structure in the universe
- Professor David Gerdes Featured in USA Today Solar Eclipse Article
- U-M Physics Research Fellow Bachana Lomsadze and Professor Steven Cundiff Develop Novel Spectroscopy Technique that Could Revolutionize Chemical Detection
- Kip S. Thorne, Winner of 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, Has U-M Physics Connections
- LIGO and Virgo Make First Detection of Gravitational Waves Produced By Colliding Neutron Stars
- Leinweber Foundation Gives $8M for Physics Center in U-M Department of Physics
- Four U-M Physics Faculty Named Fellows
- Michigan Fireball Meteor Registers As Quake: Astrophysicist David Gerdes Quoted
- Professor Fred Adams Quoted in Science News Article
- A Modern Rutherford Experiment: Scientists Use Known Energy Neutrinos to Study Nucleus
- It's Givin' Me Excitations: U-M Study Uncovers First Steps of Photosynthesis
- UM Astrophysicist David Gerdes and Team in the Hunt for Planet 9
- U-M Physics Professor Franco Nori Makes 2017 Highly Cited Researchers List
- U-M Society of Physics Students Talk STEM and More
- The 2018 Physics Commencement Live Event
- Professor Timothy McKay Reveals His Science Journey in Recent Podcast
- Physics Students Tali Khain and Noah McNeal Awarded Goldwater Scholarships
- Homer A. Neal 1942-2018
- The Higgs Boson Reveals Its Love for the Top Quark
- Physics Rev E Celebrates 'Milestone Articles' of Physics Faculty
- Physics Graduate Benjamin Isaacoff Awarded Optical Society of America's Guenther Congressional Fellowship
- Professor Katherine Freese and Team's Hunt for Dark Matter Turns to Ancient Minerals
- Professor Benjamin Safdi Awarded DOE’s Early Career Award
- Professor Christine Aidala Serves on National Academy Committee Endorsing Science Case for Electron-Ion Collider
- U-M Physicist Lu Li Cracks Code on Material that Works as Both Conductor, Insulator
- U-M Physicist Wins Nobel Prize
- New Physics Faculty Member Dominika Zgid
- Astrophysicist Katherine Freese Quoted in Astronomy Magazine
- Physicist Jennifer Ogilvie and Team Are Shedding New Light on Photosynthesis
- Professors Hui Deng and Mack Kira Named 2019 Fellows of the Optical Society
- Four Physics Faculty Named 2018 Fellows of the American Physical Society
- Four Physics Faculty Awarded American Physical Society Honors
- Gas-Detecting Laser Device Gets an Upgrade
- U-M Physicists Roberto Merlin, Meredith Henstridge and Team Develop Small Device that Bends Light to Generate New Radiation
- Physics Alum Larry Curtiss and Faculty Advisors Devised Contraption That Lead to Fiber Optics
- Michigan Physics Welcomes LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow Camille Avestruz
- Support Michigan Physics on Giving Blueday!
- Physicist Timothy Chupp Named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
- U-M Physics Senior Noah McNeal Awarded Marshall Scholarship
- Astrophysicist Katherine Freese and Colleague’s Latest Theory About Dark Stars Made Astronomy Magazine's Cover Story
- First Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Fellows Named by Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics
- Physics Graduate Student Awarded 2018-2019 Rackham International Student Fellowship
- Professor David Gerdes Named Next Physics Department Chair
- Three U-M Physicists Make Highly Cited Researchers 2018 List
- State of Michigan Governor Declares February 28, 2019: Chirped Pulse Amplification Day
- Physicist Dragan Huterer Receives Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award
- Physicist Sharon Glotzer Elected to National Academy of Engineering
- Professor Rachel Goldman Elected Vice Chair of Division of Materials Physics
- Physicist Liuyan Zhao Awarded NSF CAREER Award
- Physicist Henriette Elvang Awarded Thurnau Professorship
- Physics Senior Sophie Barterian Earns Prestigious Luce Scholarship
- Electric Dipole Moments and the Search for the Origin of Matter
- Three Physics Graduate Students Named Recipients of 2019-2020 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship
- Professor Christine Aidala receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Italy
- Professor August Evrard's Problem Roulette Tool Recently Awarded Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize
- Five U-M Physics Faculty Recently Promoted
- Professor Steven Cundiff Discusses Quantum Information Science at the White House
- Professor Stephen Forrest named Henry Russel Lecturer for 2020
- Physicist Roy Clarke and International Team Devise Way to Show How Common Elements Can Make a More Energy-Secure Future
- Professor Jens-Christian Meiners Receives Grant to Tackle the Bends
- Graduate Student Summer Fellows Named by Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics
- Professor Christine Aidala Wins Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
- U-M Physics Professor Wins Fundamental Physics Innovation Award
- 2019 U-M Physics Graduate Wins American Physical Society LeRoy Apker Award
- Pushing boundaries: Nobel prize winner on science literacy and lasers
- DESI opens its 5,000 eyes to capture the colors of the cosmos
- Team at U-M Sheds Light on New Electromagnetic Ordering
- LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector Moved Nearly a Mile Underground
- Support Michigan Physics on Giving Blueday
- Six U-M Physics Students Awarded Competitive National Fellowships
- Professor Liuyan Zhao Wins Prestigious Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) Award
- Two Graduate Students Awarded Prestigious Department of Energy Fellowships
- Electron-Ion Collider, a New Nuclear Physics Facility, to Be Built at Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Physicist David Gerdes Quoted in Michigan News Article Regarding How COVID-19 Disrupts Research Projects
- Physicist Ben Safdi and Research Team Provide Another Twist in the Dark Matter Story
- U-M Physics Faculty Member Named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Professor Xiaoming Mao Awarded $7.5M Grant to Bring Metamaterial to Life
- Now Complete, Telescope Instrument is Poised to Begin Its Search for Answers About Dark Energy
- Celebrating Our Undergraduate Awardees
- Celebrating Our Graduate Awardees
- U-M Senior’s COVID-19 Data Model Reaches CDC
- Physics Grad Student Rory Fitzpatrick and Professor Josh Spitz Shed Light on Electron Neutrino Interactions
- Professors Bjoern Penning and Marcelle Soares-Santos Highlighted in Physics Today Article
- U-M Physics Awarded $7.1 Million on Project to Upgrade the ATLAS Experiment
- When Dancers and Aliens Overlap
- Physicist David Lubensky and Team Determine Stress Fibers Help Cells Keep Their Shape—and May Also Regulate Size, During Development
- "Physics: A Resounding Legacy" - A Tribute to Patron Norman E. Barnett
- Physics Professor Joshua Spitz, Graduate Student Johnathon Jordan, and Research Team Propose Using Ancient Minerals from Deep within Earth’s Crust to Measure Cosmic Radiation
- U-M Physics Professors Byron Roe and Joshua Spitz Part of Collaboration to Search for New Physics
- Physics Grad Student Christopher Dessert Part of Team Researching X-Rays from Neutron Stars Which Could Lead to Discovery of New Particle
- Assistant Professor Liuyan Zhao Awarded a Prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship
- Assistant Professor Marcelle Soares-Santos Named 2021 Cottrell Scholar
- U-M Physicists Part of Study that Finds Unexpected Antimatter Asymmetry in the Proton
- Physics Graduate Student Kevin Napier is Lead Author on New Paper Casting Doubt on ‘Planet Nine’
- Physics Undergraduate Jiani Fei Proposes Solution to Quantum Field Theory Problem
- Physicists Hui Deng, Steve Forrest, and Research Team Discover “Egg Carton” Quantum Dot Array Could Lead to Ultralow Power Devices
- U-M Physics Group Led by Professor Tim Chupp Joins in Announcement of Stronger Evidence of New Physics Revealed by Fermilab's Muon g-2 Experiment
- U-M Physics Professors Roberto Merlin, Gregory Tarlé, and Graduate Student Noah Green Help Create Novel Optical Physics Method to Measure the Expansion of the Universe
- Physicist Christine Aidala Featured in LSA Magazine’s Spring 2021 Edition
- Dr. Melissa Hutcheson, Professor Myron Campbell and Research Team Find Possible Deviation from the Standard Model of Physics
- U-M Physics Professor Lu Li, Dr. Kuan-Wen Chen, Dr. Ziji Xiang and Research Teams Reveal a New State of Matter in Kondo Insulator
- Physicist Jennifer Ogilvie, Assistant Research Scientist Yin Song, and Researchers Trace Path of Light in Photosynthesis
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- Dark Energy Survey Releases Most Precise Look at Universe's Evolution
- Celebrating our 2021 Graduate Awardees!
- Physics Collegiate Fellow Eric Spanton Talks ‘Weird Science’
- An Inconstant Hubble Constant? U-M Research Suggests Fix to Cosmological Cornerstone
- ATLAS Provided the First Observation of the Triboson WWW Process
- 1985 Nobel laureate Klaus von Klitzing gives 29th annual Ta-You Wu lecture
- The Wow Moment, Remote
- MicroBooNE Experiment’s First Results Show No Hint of a Sterile Neutrino
- Magnets with a Twist: U-M Physics Researchers Liuyan Zhao and Her Team Engineer Magnetic Complexity into Atomically Thin Magnets
- Dr. Melissa Hutcheson Wins APS Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics
- UM Physicists Michael Schubnell, Gregory Tarlé and Team Part of Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Which Creates Largest 3D Map of the Cosmos
- Michigan Physics graduate Students Make Key Contributions to Experimental Results
- U-M Physics Researcher Co-Chairs Ballistic Missile Defense Report
- Congratulations to Physicist David Lubensky Awarded a 2022 Simons Fellowship
- Please Donate Today (March 17) to the Undergraduate Support Fund for Giving Blueday!
- What’s Inside a Black Hole? U-M Physicist Enrico Rinaldi Uses Quantum Computing, Machine Learning to Find Out
- Dr. Sangmin Choi Recipient of Honorable Mention in Rackham’s 2021 ProQuest Dissertation Awards
- U-M Physics Alum Lia Merminga Appointed Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- Physics and Astronomy Senior Anna Simpson One of Five Students to Win Prestigious 2022 Goldwater Scholarship!
- Congratulations to Mark Newman on His Election to the Royal Society
- U-M Renames Randall Laboratory Addition After Pioneering Physicist Homer A. Neal
- Congratulations to Anna Simpson, U-M's 2022 Astronaut Scholar!
- Michigan Physics Welcomes Jalen Rose Leadership Academy Scholars to Ann Arbor Campus
- Successful Startup of Particle Detector Aims to Pin Down Dark Matter
- U-M Researchers Untangle the Physics of High-Temperature Superconductors
- Live From the International Space Station, It’s Saturday Morning Physics
- A team of researchers—Robert McGehee and Aaron Pierce of U-M Physics and Gilly Elor of Johannes Gutenberg University—proposed a new candidate for dark matter: HYPER, or “HighlY Interactive ParticlE Relics.”
- A Special Thank You to Navy Captain Josh Cassada and to NASA!
- Physicist Gregory Tarlé and Team, Find First Observational Evidence Linking Black Holes to Dark Energy
- Support Michigan Physics on Giving Blueday!
- $18M to advance materials research for quantum computing, sustainable plastics and more
- Michigan Physicists and Collaborators New Muon Result Explores Uncharted Territory in Search for New Physics
- U-M Physicist Joshua Spitz Receives 2023 Experimental Physics Investigator Award
- The Universe Caught Suppressing Cosmic Structure Growth
- U-M Collaboration to Receive DOE Grant to Diversify Physics
- Five Physics Researchers From U-M Named American Physical Society Fellows
- Thank You for Your Help Supporting Women in Physics!
- It Happened at Michigan — ‘You’ve got to be excellent’
- Physics Student Sanil Mittal awarded STEM Research Career Award!
- U-M Astronomer: Get to the path of April's total solar eclipse
- Thank You for Supporting Michigan Physics on Giving Blueday!
- U-M Physics Department Franco Nori Named 2024 Charles Hard Townes Medal Recipient
- U-M Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics Mark Newman Named 2024 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize Recipient
- A New Measurement of the Expansion History of the Universe
- Physics Ph.D. Candidate and Professor Honored with Willie Hobbs Moore Awards
- U-M study: Using ‘tweezers’ to control active fluids
- Muscle machine: How water controls the speed of muscle contraction
- LZ experiment sets new record in search for dark matter
- Mining for Neutrinos, and for Cosmic Answers - Featuring U-M Alumni Bryan Ramson
- U-M Researcher Greg Tarlé and Colleagues Find Mounting Evidence for Dark Energy from Black Holes
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The Physics Department offers several awards each year to outstanding students in the department. As such, the department would like to take the opportunity to congratulate the Spring 2020 winners of these awards.
Each year, the Kent M. Terwilliger Memorial Thesis Prize is awarded, in honor of past physics faculty member Kent Terwilliger, to a graduate student determined to have the most outstanding Ph.D. thesis in physics. The department is thrilled to award this prize to Dr. Rachel Hyneman this year. In her work with the EGamma group, Dr. Hyneman has aided immensely in the search for diphoton resonance and in photon calorimeter isolation, and in the process has shown scientific maturity and understanding beyond her years, as well as unwavering dedication to her research.
The Wirt and Mary Cornwell Prize, funded by a bequest from the Cornwell family, is an annually-awarded gift distributed to the graduate student who, over four years, has shown the greatest intellectual curiosity and has shown the most promise in original and creative work in one of six disciplines, one of which is physics. This year’s prize goes to Elizabeth Drueke, a fourth-year graduate student in the department. In those four short years, Elizabeth has proven herself to be a capable, confident leader and scientist. Her research focuses on optical measurements of Weyl semimetals, and in her first year alone managed to independently build a femtosecond laser-based time-resolved optical reflectivity apparatus. She has co-authored work accepted into Nature Physics, has aided in building and now teaches the use of a 2D material fabrication platform, and has served as a mentor to several undergraduate students, among other accomplishments.
As the name suggests, the Community Engagement Award is a prize offered annually by the department to reward students who have served to improve the environment and community of the department. The department offers this award to three students this year: Rachel Owen, Chelsea Hendrus, and Alexa Rakoski. For the past four years, Alexa has served on the Graduate Council, where she has written meeting minutes, planned social events, led the first-year mentoring program, and served as a voice of reason for the Council. Rachel has also served on the Graduate Council for the past three years. In addition, she has served on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee and in the Society for Women in Physics (SWIP), represented the department at a number of conferences, greatly helped in improving recruitment weekend, and helped lead the charge to make the department more environmentally friendly, among other accomplishments. Chelsea, too, has served on the DEI committee and in SWIP, where she has been a leading force in getting the University of Michigan provisionally approved to host a regional Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP).
In honor of past Physics faculty member Peter Franken, the department presents the Franken Award to one first- or second-year graduate student who shows outstanding work. This year’s Franken Award goes to second-year Aiden Herdeschee. As an undergraduate, Aiden collaborated with graduate students to write two theory research papers, both of which have been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. He has also discovered a new way to add the masses of models with scattering amplitudes, showing incredible ingenuity and creativity. Since then, Aiden has been collaborating with highly respected researchers in the field, with whom he has written and submitted a paper to the Journal of High Energy Physics. In addition to being a successful student and researcher, Aiden also serves as a role model for other students and participates in a number of clubs and extracurricular activities.
The Frank Sevcik Award is given to one physics student each year who shows outstanding commitment to improving the international environment at the University of Michigan and who plans to contribute to academic, government, or corporate research communities in the United States. This year’s Sevcik Award is proudly presented to Ceren Dag. Ceren’s research focuses on the theory of quantum physics, including quantum information, quantum computing, and quantum measurement. One of the primary goals of this type of research is to achieve scalable quantum information processing, which may be the key to the next information technology revolution. Ceren’s thesis serves as a bridge between the problems fundamental to quantum physics and the technology revolution, and also focuses on the thermalization in quantum many-body systems. In this research, Ceren has shown incredible independence for a student of her level and has been published ten separate times, with six of them including her as the first author. These studies and contributions to the fields of quantum physics and quantum information have led Ceren to be invited to a number of leading institutes for seminars and presentations.
The family of Marc Wiedenbeck established the Wiedenbeck Teaching Award to honor Marcellus Lee “Marc” Wiedenbeck’s 40 years of service as a physics faculty member. The award is presented each year to a graduate student who exemplifies outstanding teaching abilities. This year’s winner is Grace Kerber, who has been the GSI for all four sections of the studio-style Physics 140x class for two semesters. In this position, Grace has proven invaluable. She runs group work, is in charge of the grading process, and helps in executing demonstrations in class. She has consistently gone above and beyond to assist students and teachers alike in class. Her optimism, determination, and calm demeanor have allowed her to be the rock grounding the entire course.
We are continually proud of our graduate students and are happy to honor just some of their accomplishments each year.