Events
An archive of Physics & Astronomy's News Items:
April 2007:
Prof. Mirjam Cvetic is a recipient of 2007 Distinguished Alumni Award for the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland.
March 2007:
Dr. Paulo Arratia
who works with Prof. Doug Durian and Prof. Jerry Gollub has won
the first prize for his video in the APS March meeting competition.
Dr. Arratia's investigated filament thinning and breakup for equal-viscosity
immiscible fluids in microchannel cross flow, showing vastly different
behavior with and without 100 ppm polymer in the droplet phase.
To see the movie go to: http://www.physics.upenn.edu/duriangroup/multimedia/paulo/paulo_movie.mov
Balancing
family and physics careers at the Americal Physical Society March
Meeting in Denver:
Prof. Andrea
Liu, program chair for the Committee on the Status of Women
in Physics (CSWP), organized a panel discussion on practical strategies
for balancing careers and family.Invited speakers also included
Prof. Marija
Drndic from Penn's Physics Department. The panel also discussed
practices that departments, academic institutions and funding agencies
could adopt that would make a difference to faculty, postdocs and
graduate students who are balancing career and family. The suggestions
from the panelists have been compiled into a list of recommendations. (link)
February 2007:
Professor Randall Kamien writes a perspective in the Feb. 23rd edition of Science entitled "Better Geometry Through Chemistry"
December 2006:
Professor of Chemistry Andrew Rappe, member of the Graduate Group, was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for contributions to electronic structure methodology, understanding mechanisms of chemisorption bonding and energy exchange with surfaces, and for relating chemical identity to material response in ferroelectric oxides."
Graduate student Tao Liu has been named a McCormick Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Graduate student Monica Dunford has been named a Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago.
November 2006:
Professor Charles Kane was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for significant contributions to the theory of electronic transport in low-dimensional systems, including Luttinger liquids, the quantum Hall effect, carbon nanotubes and graphene."
PENN hosted the joint PENN -NYU Soft Matter Workshop, on November 2. Click here to view poster.
October 2006:
Prof. A. Brooks Harris is the recipient of the Lars Onsager Prize for his many contributions to the statistical physics of random systems, including the formulation of the Harris criterion, which has led to numerous insights into a variety of disordered systems.
Prof. Nigel Lockyer's article in Physics World.
July 2006:
"How
Much the Eye Tells the Brain" - Read the article with Prof. Vijay
Balasubramanian in the New Scientist Magazine on how eyes
transfer
information to the brain.
Prof. Nigel Lockyer talks about elementary particle physics for Newsday.
Randall D. Kamien has been appointed the Vicki and William Abrams Professor in the Natural Sciences.
Mark Goulian has been named the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of Biology.
Jay Kikkawa has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Physicists solve pebble mystery article on PhysicsWeb.org speaking of work collaborated by Doug Durian in addition to Physicists in France.
June 2006:
Exploring the Tiniest of Science Frontiers - Article about research in Marija Drndic's group in the Penn Arts and Science Magazine
May 2006:
Professor Vijay Balasubramanian's article "Information Recovery From Black Holes" has won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation's annual essay competition.
April 2006:
Professor Joe Kroll featured in article about precision measurement of extremely rapid transitions between matter and antimatter "Scientists Precisely Measure Subatomic Particle as It Flips Between Matter and Antimatter 3 Trillion Times per Second" . He is also featured in the New York Times.
Q&A with Professor Licia Verde in the Penn Current. And further information about her collaboration on "First-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters"
March 2006:
Professor Vijay Balasubramanian receives the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching
Enkeleida Lakuriqi receives the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students
NEW SATELLITE DATA ON UNIVERSE'S FIRST TRILLIONTH SECOND
Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence for what happened within its first trillionth of a second, when the universe suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than a wink of the eye.
WMAP results have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and are posted online at http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/results.
The
WMAP team includes researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Md.; The Johns Hopkins University; Princeton University;
the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto; the
University of Texas at Austin; Cornell University; the University
of Chicago; Brown University in Providence, R.I.; the University
of British Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; and
the University of California, Los Angeles.
American Physical Society Condensed Matter March Meeting talks by members of our department:
Adam
Abate, Graduate Student with Prof. Durian
Onset of jamming for gas-fluidized grains
Yehuda Snir, Graduate Student with Prof. Kamien
Entropically Driven Helix Formation
Charles
Kane, Faculty
The Quantum Spin Hall Effect
Mark Goulian, Faculty
Directed Evolution of Bacterial Chemoreceptors
A. Brooks
Harris, Emertitus Faculty
Ferroelectricity in Incommensurate Magnets
Marija Drndic, Faculty
Controlled assembly and electronics in
semiconductor nanocrystal-based devices
February 2006: Evelyn Thomson was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
Prof. A.T. "Charlie" Johnson had a feature article in the Monday, February 13, 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn Physicists Make Progress Towards a Carbon Nanotube/DNA "Electronic Nose"
In November 2004 Prof. Phil Nelson's newly published book Biological Physics was reviewed in Nature magazine. Now it's been published in Spanish! And Chinese!
Featured profile on Harold "Buddy" Borders in the "At Work With..." section of the Penn Current. Buddy works in the machine shop in David Rittenhouse Labs, and has for nearly 30 years!
October 2005: The 2006 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics of the American Physical Society was awarded to Nigel Lockyer , William Ford, and John Jaros "For their leading contributions to the discovery of the long b-quark lifetime with the MAC and MarkII experiments at SLAC.The unexpectedly large value of the b-quark lifetime revealed the hierarchy of the Cabbibo Kobayashi Maskawa quark mixing matrix."
June 2005: Penn Professor Arjun Yodh, graduate students Ahmed Alsayed and Jian Zhang, postdoc Mohammad Islam, and Adjunct Professor Peter Collings (Professor at Swarthmore) probe melting of colloidal crystals. To read the Science article, click here . For popular articles, read articles in Pennnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer
An international team led by Penn Professor Mark Devlin, and including Penn researchers Jeff Klein, Ed Chapin, and Simon Dicker and Penn graduate student Marie Rex, launches the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope or BLAST to collect images of objects in our solar system as well as the distant light that details the formation of stars and the evolution of whole galaxies. For popular descriptions of the launch, read articles in Pennnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer , or for more detailed information, visit the Penn BLAST homepage
Assistant Professor Marija Drndic was one of 58 scientists across the country to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
February 2005: Marija Drndic was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
December 2004: Doug Durian and Andrea Liu were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society: Durian "For ground-breaking contributions to the measurement and understanding of dynamics in foams and granular media," and Liu "For seminal contributions to the theory of charged biopolymers and of jammed systems."
November
2004: Christopher
Dobson, reviewing Phil
Nelson's new book on biological physics in the November
25, 2004 issue of Nature writes:
"Philip Nelson's excellent text, Biological Physics, provides
material for the types of course we should now be offering to all
our students.... Particularly impressive is the subtle way that
topics that often cause the eyes of even the most diligent student
to glaze over are made to seem not just interesting to read about
but compelling to learn.... As Nelson cleverly shows, many of the
most important scientific breakthroughs have come about unexpectedly
through just the type of interdisciplinary studies that this book
promotes."
July 2004: Gene Beier was named the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics. Douglas Durian and Andrea Liu joined our faculty as Full Professors and Evelyn Thomson as an Assistant Professor. Doug comes to us from the Department of Physics and Andrea from the Department of Chemistry at UCLA. Doug is a soft condensed-matter experimentalist. He is best known for his work on foams and on multiple scattering and diffusing wave spectroscopy. Andrea is a soft condensed matter theorist who works on jamming and interactions and bundling in charged semi-flexible polymers. Evelyn is a high-energy experimentalist. She did her graduate work at the University of Glasgow and postdoctoral work at the Ohio State University and Fermilab . She is co-convener of the CDF top Physics Group.
March 2004: Oliver E. Buckley Prize was awarded to Tom Lubensky, "For seminal contributions to the theory of condensed matter systems including the prediction and elucidation of the properties of new, partially ordered phases of complex materials."
July 2003: Mirjam Cvetic was named the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics and Mark Devlin was appointed Class of 1965 Term Professor.
July 2003: Marija Drndic and Licia Verde joined our faculty as new Assistant Professors. Marija did her graduate work and Harvard, and she was a Pappalardo Fellow at MIT. She is a condensed matter experimentalist specializing in arrays of quantum dots and on quantum transport. Licia did her graduate work at the University of Edinburgh, and she did postdoctoral work at Princeton and Rutgers with the help of a NASA Chandra Fellowship. She is a cosmologist and a member of the WMAP team.
November 2003: Burt Ovrut lands a starring role in NOVA's "The elegant universe: Welcome to the 11th dimension "
2003: Alan (Charlie) T. Johnson was awarded the 2003 Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching .
2003: Science Magazine, in its Dec. 19, 2003 issue, named the remarkable advances in our understanding of the universe, its dark matter and dark energy "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003". This was made possible by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and by new galaxy surveys: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Two-degree-Field Galaxy Redshift Survey. Congratulations to Licia Verde, who is a member of the WMAP team, to Bhuvnesh Jain and Max Tegmark, who are members of the SDSS team, and to Raul Jimenez and postdocs and graduate students, Yongzhong Xu, Xiaomin Wang and Reiko Nakajima, who participated in the analysis of the SDSS data.
2002-2003: The accounting of Solar Neutrinos by the SNO (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) collaboration, in which Gene Beier and Josh Klein played major roles, was named number two "Breakthrough of the Year: 2002" by Science Magazine and one of the top two science stories in 2002 by the AIP journal, Physics News Update . Three of the SNO publications were ranked one, two, and three in the top ten most cited papers in the November/December, 2003 issue of the Thomson ISI newsletter Science Watch .
2002: The
National Digital Mammography Archive spearheaded by Bob
Hollebeek was ranked as the number one project in 2002 InfoWorld
"Top 100" survey.