Published works by Sankar Das Sarma, Ian Spielman, Jacob Taylor and Dennis vanEngelsdorp have consistently been judged by their peers to be of particular use and significance
Four faculty members in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences are included on Clarivate Analytics’ 2017 list of Highly Cited Researchers, a compilation of influential names in science.  

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Noted physics educator John W. Layman, who held a joint appointment in Physics and the Department of Education until his retirement in 1998, died on December 30, 2017. He was 84.

Prof. Layman, an Illinois native, received an undergraduate degree from Park College in Missouri in 1955 and then taught science in Kansas City public schools. In 1961, he moved to Philadelphia to earn a master’s degree in education from Temple University. He resumed his high school teaching career in Missouri until entering Oklahoma State University, where he received his doctorate in education in 1970 and quickly accepted his appointment at UMD.

Prof. Layman used his background in education to raise the consciousness of UMD Physics faculty in the issues of teaching and learning. He introduced (and ran) training for teaching assistants and developed new lecture demonstration materials. He developed and taught a course for prospective elementary school teachers using laboratory-based and inquiry-based methods to study some of the basic ideas of the physical sciences. His impact on the educational outlook of the physics faculty was perhaps as profound as his impact on his own students.

Prof. Layman was known for his enthusiasm in the classroom, infusing classes such as the Physics of Light with highly-entertaining demonstrations and descriptions of rainbows, prisms and holograms. Along with colleagues in the UMD Physics Education Research Group, he was an early adapter and researcher of the role of computers in the realm of science teaching.

In 1982, he served as President of the American Association of Physics Teachers; a few years later, he was instrumental in persuading the organization to relocate to College Park from Stony Brook, NY. This move eventually prompted the centralization of physics societies here. He was pivotal in founding the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC), an AAPT-American Physical Society (APS) partnership, and in developing the Powerful Ideas in Physical Science curriculum to train elementary school teachers. In 1998, the AAPT recognized his numerous contributions with the Melba Newell Phillips Award.

In the 2015 AAPT summer conference hosted at UMD, the group honored Prof. Layman with a plaque recognizing "his many years of dedication and service to AAPT as Secretary, President, Archivist, and numerous other roles."

Dr. Layman was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the APS, which cited him in 2003 “…for his contributions to physics education and for his national leadership in the training of physics teachers.” He was named a Distinguished Alumnus by his undergraduate alma mater in 2005.

A memorial service was held at the University of Maryland Memorial Chapel, Garden Chapel on February 10th at 1 pm. The family asked that donations in Prof. Layman's memory be made to "AAPT, University of Maryland Department of Physics, or your favorite charity."

The DFG announced today that Professor Alessandra Buonanno will be honoured with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize for her key role in the first direct observations of gravitational waves. This long-awaited discovery is a historic scientific milestone, and was awarded this year’s Nobel prize in Physics. Alessandra Buonanno is one of the scientists who made the detection possible.  

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Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) tops the charts for the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year with Physics World with the first multimessenger observation of a neutron-star merger.  UMD Professors Alessandra Buonanno and Peter Shawhan are both collaborators with LIGO and have contributed to the detection of the fourth gravitational wave. 

Professor Chris Monroe and his colleagues have also been included in the Physics World Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2017 for their research on time crystals.  The study of time crystals was first envisioned five years ago when Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek proposed the idea.  Chris Monroe has one of the leading experiments.  His group uses trapped ions to create time crystals in their lab. Physics World also recognizes Mikhail Lukin and his collaborators at Harvard University who have been simultaneously working with time crystals using diamond defects.

Alumnus Charles L. Bennett (B.S. Physics and Astronomy, 1978) has received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies.” Bennett, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, led the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission. Members of the WMAP team will share the $3 million prize for their measurements and insights into the young universe.

Prof. Bennett also received the 2017 Institute of Physics (IOP) Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, the Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the National Academy of Sciences’ Draper Medal and Comstock Prize in Physics. He was the Department of Physics Alumnus of the Year in 2003.