Department News Archive


Ryan Freund and Shrutina Shrestha Receive Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award

Ryan Freund and Shrutina Shrestha Receive Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award
Physics majors Ryan Freund and Shrutina Shrestha have each received the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award from The Hopkins Office for Undergraduate Research. The award is designed to support and encourage Hopkins undergraduate students to engage in independent research, scholarly and creative projects, it was created in 1993 with a generous endowment by the Hodson Trust.


Jennifer Lotz Appointed as Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute

Jennifer Lotz Appointed as Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute
Jennifer Lotz, who earned her PhD in astrophysics from the department in 2003, has been appointed as the next Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Dr. Lotz will begin her five-year appointment as STScI Director starting February 12, 2024. Previously, Dr. Lotz was the Director of the International Gemini Observatory.


Emanuele Berti and David Kaplan Named Simons Investigators in Physics

Emanuele Berti and David Kaplan Named Simons Investigators in Physics
Professor Emanuele Berti and Professor David Kaplan, who have both been named Simons Investigators in Physics by the Simons Foundation. Simons Investigators are outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions. An Investigator receives research support of $150,000 per year for a period of five years. An additional $10,000 per year is provided to the Investigator’s department.


Euclid’s Two Instruments Have Captured Their First Test Images

Euclid’s Two Instruments Have Captured Their First Test Images
The Euclid Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrometer & Photometer and VISible instrument have both delivered successful test images that indicate the space telescope will achieve the scientific goals that it has been designed for. Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Chuck Bennett, Professor Brice Ménard, and Associate Research Scientist Graeme Addison—are part of the Euclid's science team and will take part in the analysis of the mission's data.


Thomas Edwards Receives 2023 Mark O. Robbins Future Faculty Prize in High-performance Computing

Thomas Edwards Receives 2023 Mark O. Robbins Future Faculty Prize in High-performance Computing
Thomas Edwards, a postdoctoral fellow working with Marc Kamionkowski and Emanuele Berti, has received the 2023 Mark O. Robbins Future Faculty Prize in high-performance computing. The award recognizes work by Edwards and his collaborators in which they used automatic differentiation and AI-assisted techniques to produce a code that analyzes gravitational waveforms from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) with far less computational time than the standard LIGO analysis pipeline.


Euclid Space Telescope is Go for Launch: July 1, 2023

Euclid Space Telescope is Go for Launch: July 1, 2023
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope will launch from Kennedy Space Center on Saturday July 1. Bloomberg Professor Chuck Bennet, Professor Brice Ménard, and Associate Research Scientist Graeme Addison are part of the Euclid mission’s science team. Euclid will survey galaxies over the sky to determine the nature of the dark universe. This includes dark energy, which is currently driving an accelerated expansion of the universe, and dark matter, which is not made of atoms and does not interact with light. The central science goal of Euclid is to characterize and understand dark energy and dark matter more completely.