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.
News & Announcements Archive
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, 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 Mission Begins: Chuck Bennett, Brice Ménard, and Graeme Addison Will Analyze Telescope’s Data
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.
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.
Launch Anniversary of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe: June 30, 2001
June 30th marks the anniversary of the launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which started its nine-year mission in space on this date in 2001 to measure temperature differences across the sky in the cosmic microwave background. Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Chuck Bennett was the Principal Investigator of the mission. WMAP’s measurements were so exact that they form the foundation of the Standard Cosmological Model. In 2012, Bennett and the 26-person WMAP team was recognized by the Gruber Foundation’s 2012 Cosmology Prize for their transformative study of light from the infant universe. In 2018, the WMAP science team was also awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Julian Muñoz Named One of ScienceNews’ 10 Scientists to Watch
Theoretical physicist Julian Muñoz, who earned his PhD from the department in 2017, has been named to the SN 10: Scientists to Watch list from ScienceNews. Dr. Muñoz studies the universe’s early years, when the first stars began to shine and galaxies began to light up. He has developed a way to measure distances in that era, called a standard ruler.
Izze Hedricks, Grace Luettgen, Daniel Naiman, and Xin “Jason” Zhang Receive Undergraduate Research Recognition
The department is happy to announce a slew of outstanding achievements by undergraduate researchers: Grace Luettgen received an ASPIRE grant from the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Program to work with Prof. […]
Ziwei “Peter” Hu and Yiqi “Andrew” Liu Receive 2023 Donald E. Kerr Memorial Award
The department is pleased to announce that undergraduates Ziwei “Peter” Hu and Yiqi “Andrew” Liu are joint recipients of the 2023 Donald E. Kerr Memorial Award. The Kerr Award, established in 1979, acknowledges outstanding graduating physics majors who have distinguished themselves through their performance in the classroom, their accomplishments in research, and their other positive contributions to the department.
Ali Ghasemi, Neha Anil Kumar, Chris Lygouras, Bastian Pradenas, and Vladimir Strokov Receive Graduate Teaching Awards
The Graduate Program Committee is pleased to announce their selection of the most outstanding graduate student Teaching Assistants in the department with their annual graduate teaching awards. The recipients are: Excellence […]