Physics Alumnus Leo Singer,  Undergraduate Physics Majors Kaitlyn Tuley and John Siberholz have won NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFP). Singer is currently a first year graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. His field of study is in Gravitational Experiment. Siberholz and Tuley are graduating seniors at Maryland.

The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees. GRFP Fellows receive three years of support, an annual stipend, cost-of-education allowance, one-time international travel allowance and TeraGrid Supercomputer access.

On March 4, 2010, President Mote and NASA-Goddard Director Rob Strain signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote collaboration between NASA-Goddard and the University of Maryland. A Space Act Agreement between the two institutions was signed by Dean Steve Halperin and Dr. Nick White of NASA-Goddard. The Agreement launches the Joint Space-Science Institute (JSI), a partnership between the Departments of Astronomy and Physics and NASA-Goddard, with Chris Reynolds (Astronomy) as Director.

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On Tuesday, March 30, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, did for the first time what it was created to do, smash together beams of elementary particles at extremely high levels of energy.

Scientists at the LHC collided two proton beams, each with energies of 3.5 TeV (trillion electron volts)- the highest energies ever achieved by a man-made particle accelerator!

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http://www.steinershow.org/radio/the-marc-steiner-show/march-30-2010-segment-2

University of Maryland researchers have created a completely new way to produce high quality semiconductor materials critical for advanced microelectronics and nanotechnology. Published in the March 26 issue of Science, their research is a fundamental step forward in nanomaterials science that could lead to significant advances in computer chips, photovoltaic cells, biomarkers and other applications, according to the authors and other experts.

Led by Min Ouyang, an assistant professor in the department of physics, the University of Maryland team has created a process that uses chemical thermodynamics to produce a broad range of different combination materials, each with a shell of structurally perfect mono-crystal semiconductor around a metal core.

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