Department News Archive


Melissa Diamond Named 2019 Gardner Fellow

Melissa Diamond has been awarded the Gardner Fellowship in our department. Diamond is a third-year student working with David Kaplan. Her current research is focused on a project analyzing how polarized light from AGNs or other objects could be used to detect particles/fields with axion-like couplings to photons.


Society of Physics Students’ National Office Names JHU Outstanding Chapter

The National Council of the Society of Physics Students has awarded the Johns Hopkins University SPS Chapter a 2017-2018 Outstanding Chapter. Chapter designations are determined by carefully reviewing the information, photos and supporting material presented in the annual SPS Chapter Reports.


Vivian Poulin Leads Cosmology Theorists in Paper Concerning “Hubble Tension”

Postdoctoral fellow Vivian Poulin, along with graduate student Tanvi Karwal, Professsor Marc Kamionkowski, and Tristan Smith, of Swarthmore College, have published a paper that offers a resolution to one of cosmology’s biggest crises: “Hubble Tension.” The team of theorists point to a new exotic form of matter in the early universe as a possible solution […]


Jason Kalirai Named Civil Space Mission Area Executive at APL

Jason Kalirai, a member of the department’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences, has been named mission area executive for civil space programs at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. His research program has included use of major telescopes on and above Earth, including the 10-meter Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. […]


Cristina Mantilla Suarez Selected as LHC Physics Center’s Graduate Scholar

Graduate student Cristina Mantilla Suarez has been selected as one of the two LHC Physics Center’s Graduate Scholars for 2019. This program is aimed to support exceptional Graduate Students from the US institutions working on the CMS experiment at CERN, by allowing them to spend a year at Fermilab to pursue thesis research opportunities at the LHC […]


Kevin Schlaufman Discovers One of the Oldest Stars in the Universe

Assistant Professor Kevin Schlaufman was recently featured on The Hub for his recently published paper, “An Ultra Metal-poor Star Near the Hydrogen-burning Limit” in The Astrophysical Journal. Schlaufman and co-authors have discovered a star that could be one of the oldest in the universe—at 13.5 billion years old, it could be as little as one generation […]


Nhan Tran awarded 2019 Henry Primakoff Award

Former PhD student Nhan Tran has been awarded the 2019 Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics by the American Physical Society. He is being recognized “for wide-ranging contributions to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, including the development of a novel pileup subtraction method at the Large Hadron Collider, and the use of jet substructure […]


Yichen Shen, Class of ’11, Named Forbes’ “30 Under 30” for Energy Technology

Yichen Shen, former JHU Physics major (class of 2011), has been named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” for his contributions to energy technology. Yichen is the founder and CEO of Lightelligence Inc. and the founder of Lux Labs Inc., two companies that leverage advances in nanophotonics he developed in his PhD and postdoctoral research […]


NASA Features Prof Julian Krolik’s Work on Spiraling Supermassive Black Holes

NASA featured science by Prof. Julian Krolik and co-authors on their homepage today.  The science focuses on a computer simulation of two supermassive black holes spiraling toward collision. It fully incorporates the physical effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and shows that gas in such systems will glow predominantly in ultraviolet and X-ray light. 


Shu Zhang Earns Graduate Fellowship at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics

Graduate student Shu “Suzy” Zhang has earned a graduate fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. The purpose of the Graduate Fellowship Program is to offer a unique opportunity for a select group of physics doctoral students to spend a minimum period of 5 months at the KITP, participate in KITP research programs, and […]