|  | | | Department NewsLast updated 5/14/2013  | The 37th Johns Hopkins Workshop on current problems in particle theory will be held in Seoul, Korea at Seoul National University June 19-22, 2013, entitled NEW PERSPECTIVES IN STRING THEORY Check back again for more information as it is available |
|  | Tim Heckman and Marc Kamionkowski were are among the 198 new members elected to the 2013 class of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a group that includes past winners of the Nobel Prize; the National Medal of Science; the Lasker Award; Pulitzer and Shaw prizes; MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; Kennedy Center Honors; and Grammy, Emmy, Academy, and Tony awards. Since its founding in 1780, the academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation. Click here for the AAAS web page |
|  | Zlatko Tesanovic Memorial Symposium The Johns Hopkins University Department of Physics and Astronomy is hosting an all-day symposium honoring the life and work of Professor Zlatko Tesanovic from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, March 23 in the Bloomberg Center. Click here for more information |
|  | Johns Hopkins Astrophysicists Join Space Mission Aimed at Solving ‘Dark’ Mysteries of the Universe
Johns Hopkins astrophysicists Brice Ménard and Charles L. Bennett have been appointed to the Euclid Consortium, the international team of scientists overseeing an ambitious space telescope project designed to probe the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. NASA, a partner in the mission, recently announced their selection to the research team for Euclid. The JHU Department of Physics and Astronomy has been at the forefront in this field, from its participation in the discovery of the Higgs boson candidate, to the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerated expansion of the universe, to the measurement of the current expansion rate of the universe, and the precision measurements of the contents and history of the universe. Click here for more information |
|  | Dr. Jason Kalirai Awarded the 2013 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize Jason Kalirai, who is an Associate Research Scientist in our Center for Astrophysical Sciences, has been awarded the 2013 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize. This annual prize from the American Astronomical Society is for outstanding achievement in observational astronomy by an astronomer under the age of 36.
Click here for more information |
|  | JHU Physicist Inaugural Winner of 2012 Prize of the Asian Union of Magnetics Societies
Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and the Director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, is a winner of the first-ever Asian Union of Magnetic Societies Award, recognizing his “seminal contribution to magnetic materials, nanostructures, magnetoelectronic phenomena and devices.”
Chien’s current research interests include fabrication of nanostructured materials and their structural, electronic, magnetic, and superconducting properties; highly spin polarized materials, spin-transfer torque effects, and magnetoelectronics. Click here for more information |
|  | JHU's Ménard named "Maryland's Outstanding Young Scientist of 2012 Astrophysicist Brice Ménard of the Johns Hopkins University has been selected by the Maryland Academy of Sciences as the Outstanding Young Scientist of 2012. He received the award at a ceremony which was held at the Maryland Science Center yesterday. Ménard, an assistant professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, was recognized for his research in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. Click here for more information |
|  | Johns Hopkins Chemist Wins Packard Fellowship Chemist Tyrel McQueen has been awarded a 2012 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The fellowship is one of 16 awarded each year nationwide, and bestows unrestricted funds of $875,000 (over a five-year period) to unusually creative young faculty members in science and engineering. McQueen will use the award to continue his work toward discovering, designing and controlling materials with exotic electronic states of matter, with applications ranging from fundamental science to solving energy problems. Click here for more information |
|  | JHU Cosmologists Receive “New Frontiers” Award for Work on “Origami Universe” Mark Neyrinck and Miguel Aragón-Calvo, both of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at JHU, were chosen from an international competition to receive a grant to explore fundamental questions in astronomy and cosmology that engage groundbreaking ideas on the nature of the universe. Click here for more information |
|  | Astronomers spy distant galaxy in its infancy. Discovery of small, faint galaxy opens window into deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history. With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers led by Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light of the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old. Click here for more information |
| | In Memoriam – Prof. Zlatko Tesanovic Please click here |
|  | The 2012 Gruber Foundation Prize in Cosmology has been awarded to Chuck Bennett and the WMAP team!!! Building on his own pioneering contributions to the study of the early universe, Charles L. Bennett, along with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe team, used observations of the so-called "echo of the Big Bang," the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, to determine the universe's vital statistics-its age, content, geometry, and origin. This feat in turn has helped transform cosmology itself into a precision science. Click here for more information |
|  | The 36th Johns Hopkins Workshop will be organized in the context of the GGI Workshop "Understanding the TeV Scale Through LHC Data, Dark Matter, and Other Experiments", on October 16, 17, 18, 19, 2012 and it will be held in Arcetri, Florence. Click here for more information |
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 | Deans Undergraduate Research Award (DURA) Winners
Congratulations to the following 2012 P&A department DURA award winners:
Senior Capstone Project Awards: Max Abitbol
Senior Capstone Project Awards winner: Benjamin Leith
Faculty Research Assistantships winner: Chris Mongi Click here for more information |
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 | Sophomore Matthew Hill has won a Dean's Undergraduate Research Award and a Provost's Undergraduate Research Award. Mr. Hill will use the Undergrad Research award to support his research with Prof. Nadia Zakamska on molecular hydrogen emissions in luminous infrared galaxies. |
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 | Graduate student Jerome T. Mlack has been awarded a 3-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He will be conducting condensed matter physics research with Prof. Nina Markovic on the topic of Transport Measurements of Topological Insulator Nanodevices. |
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 | Petar Maksimovic has been awarded the 2012 Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Arts and Sciences. This award is sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association and the Dean's office of KSAS. Petar will be officially recognized for this award at the Commencement exercises held Thursday, May 24, 2012 |
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| Thomson Reuters' "Science Watch" announced on April 11 that all three of the most highly cited scientific papers in the world published in 2011 were from an astrophysics space mission project led by Johns Hopkins Professor Chuck Bennett. The three astrophysics papers report results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy (WMAP) space mission. Click here for more information |
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 | Mark Robbins, a theoretical physicist and professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University has been awarded a Simons Fellowship in Physics. Click here for the University News Release Click here for more information on the Simons Fellowship |
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 | Graduate student Ting-Wen Lan has been named the 2012 William Gardner Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Mr. Lan will use the support provided by the Gardner Fellowship to begin research with Prof. Brice Ménard. Together they will analyze thousands of quasar spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and study the distribution of gas around galaxies with absorption line spectroscopy. |
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| Astrophysicist Brice Ménard of The Johns Hopkins University has won a 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship to further support his research on extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology.
Ménard is one of 126 young scientists and economists to receive the award this year in recognition of their potential to contribute to academic advancement.
Click here for more information |
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 | Heather Knutson, a Johns Hopkins physics major (B.Sc. 2004) has been awarded the American Astronomical Society's 2012 Annie Jump Cannon Award. The prize, named for the astronomer renowned for her work on stellar classification, is awarded annually to a North American female astronomer within five years of her PhD for outstanding research contributions. The 2012 prize is awarded to Knutson for her work on hot Jupiters, massive gaseous planets that have been discovered orbiting stars other than our own Sun. Click here for more information |
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 | Former JHU Physics and Astronomy graduate student Dr. Guangyong XU is the 2012 NSSA Science prize winner for his work on relaxor ferroelectrics. Dr. Xu was awarded his Ph.D. in Physics from JHU in 1999. Click here for more information |
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 | JHU Astrophysicist Miguel Angel Aragon's computer illustration "The Cosmic Web" was awarded first place in the Informational Posters & Graphics category of the 2011 NSF International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Click here to read the JHU Press Release |
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 | Alexander Szalay of Johns Hopkins University wins Microsoft's Jim Gray eScience Award Click here for more information Click here for JHU News Release |
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 | Congratulations to our own Adam Riess, awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences! Click here for NobelPrize.org Click here for the JHU Press Release Please join us in watching the presentation of the Nobel award being presented to Adam Riess!!! Click here to see a clip of the awards ceremony. |
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 | Newly elected American Physical Society Fellows include Dan Reich, Adam Reiss, Kirill Melnikov and Zlatko Tesanovic. APS Fellowships are a distinct honor given after extensive review by the Fellowship committee of the appropriate APS division, topical group or forum and by the APS Fellowship Committee. |
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|  | The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland at College Park a $1.2 million grant to upgrade the internet pipeline in Maryland. This award will increase JHU's network capacity to 100 gigabit per second. JHU physicist Alex Szalay stated "This bandwidth upgrade will now allow enormous scientific data sets to be moved to JHU from Google, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center" To see the press release, click here |
|  | Nadia L. Zakamska of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University has received a Sloan Research Fellowship to continue her research, which uses Earth and space-based telescopes and large data sets to answer important questions about the universe and its origins. Click here for more information |
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| Physics and Astronomy Research Professor Joseph Silk has just been named one of the 2011 Balzan Prize winners for his work on the early Universe. Click here for more information |
|  | Prof. Brice Ménard has been awarded the 2011 Henri Chrétien research grant by the American Astronomical Society for his research on the large-scale distribution of dust particles in the Universe. This international award is in honor of the memory of Henri Chrétien, Professor of Optics and co-originator of the Ritchey-Chrétien telescope design, used in most modern telescopes. |
|  | Two of our own named among JHU's first Gilman Scholars. Charles Bennett and Adam Riess were among the first group of Gilman Scholars comprised of 17 men and women from across the University. Among them are Nobel laureates, award-winning teachers and world-renowned researchers and scholars. Click here for the JHU Gazette article and here for more information |
|  | Graduate student Katy Tolfree has been awarded a 3-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She will be conducting astrophysics research with Prof. Rosie Wyse on the topic of Radial Migration and the Formation of Galactic Disks. |
|  | Graduate student Danru Qu has been named the 2011 William Gardner Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Ms. Qu will use the support provided by the Gardner Fellowship to begin research with Prof. Chia-Ling Chien applying nanoelectronics to study problems in biological physics. |
|  | Adam Riess, together with Saul Perlmutter of UC Berkeley, has been awarded the "Einstein Medal 2011" for "discovering the acceleration of the Universe via the observation of high-z supernovae". Click here for more information on the Einstein Medal Click here for a listing of Einstein Medal Laureates |
| | |  | Team led by JHU Astrophysicist Suvi Gezari Catches Black Hole Red-Handed in Stellar Homicide. Click here for more information |
|  | Jessica Noviello, a Johns Hopkins University sophomore, is the first student approved for a new "space minor" course being offered at the University. Click here for more information For more information about the new Minor in Space Science and Engineering, click here |
| | The 36th Johns Hopkins Workshop will be organized in the context of the GGI Workshop "Understanding the TeV Scale Through LHC Data, Dark Matter, and Other Experiments", on October 16, 17, 18, 19, 2012 and it will be held in Arcetri, Florence. Click here for more information |
|  | What does dark energy and auto racing have in common? Just ask JHU advanced physics student Dillon Brout who uses his knowledge of dark energy to help the Dyson racing team analyze data generated by the team cars. Click here for the Hopkins article Click here for the New York Times article |
|  | New Scientist is featuring a video from The Department of Physics and Astronomy. A demo by graduate student Gary Lee Johns shows some of the the interesting sculptures that can be generated when ferrofluid is placed in a magnetic field. Click here for more information |
|  | On March 2, 2011, the 16th anniversary of the Astro-2 shuttle mission that launched the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope into space, HUT principal investigator Arthur F. Davidsen was commemorated with the dedication of a new educational display system in the lobby of the Bloomberg Center. Click here for more information |
| | |  | New faculty: Professor Marc Kamionkowski, considered one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists for his work in large-scale structures and the early history of the universe, will join the faculty in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences on July 1. An endowed professor at California Institute of Technology, Kamionkowski has spent much of his career researching astrophysics, cosmology and elementary particle theory. Click here for more information |
| | New Faculty: Assistant Professor Nadia Zakamska is a theorist and observational astronomer who combines mining of large data sets with investigations using major telescopes on Earth and in space. She is pursuing novel studies in a wide range of subfields in astrophysics, from planetary dynamics to galaxy formation. Click here for Dr. Zakamska's page |
| | New Faculty: Assistant Professor Brice Ménard is a theorist who is interested in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. He mines large data sets to gain insight into the universe and has made major discoveries about the relationship between stars, dark matter, and the presence of tiny grains of dust around galaxies. Click here for Dr. Ménard's page |
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|  | Timothy M. Heckman appointed as the inaugural Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professor. Dedication will be held on Tuesday, May 10th at 4pm in the Schafler Auditorium of the Bloomber Center for Physics and Astronomy. Click here for more information |
|  | Prof. Chia-Ling Chien was just elected a fellow of the AAAS in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the fields of condensed matter physics and materials research. Click here for more information from JHU Click here for more information from AAAS |
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