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, 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.
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Adam Riess has received the H0 Award from The Chalonge – de Vega International School of Astrophysics in Paris. Riess received the award for “his relentless clever work and deep discoveries regarding the expansion rate of the Universe.”
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Marc Kamionkowski participated in a Q&A article about one of his recent publications with Knowable Magazine from Annual Reviews. Kamionkowski answered questions from science journalist Dan Falk about his publication titled “The Hubble Tension and Early Dark Energy.”
Johns Hopkins has been named one of the 11 participating institutions for a new postdoctoral prize fellowship in observational cosmology sponsored by The Brinson Foundation.
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.
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, 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.
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Chuck Bennett, Professor Brice Ménard, and Associate Research Scientist Graeme Addison are part of the Euclid space telescope’s science team and will take part in the analysis of the mission’s data once collection begins.
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.