An inaugural ceremony for the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory was held on March 19-20, 2015, in México's Volcán Sierra Negra mountains. Professor Jordan Goodman is the U.S. spokesperson on the experiment, working with associate research scientist Andrew J. Smith, postdoctoral researchers Colas Rivière and Brian Baughman, and graduate student Joshua Wood.

The report describing a three-fold enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature is featured as an Editor's Suggestion in Physical Review B - Rapid Communications.

Distinguished University Professor Ellen Williams discusses her vision for the future of energy innovation with Scientific American magazine.

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Assistant Professor Vladimir Manucharyan and Affiliate Assistant Professor Mohammad Hafezi have both been awarded research fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Research Fellowships "seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise" and are awarded "in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions." Both Manucharyan and Hafezi are members of the UMD-NIST Joint Quantum Institute.

Kai Sun, a recent JQI postdoctoral researcher now at the University of Michigan, was also awarded a Sloan Fellowship.

The complete list of 2015 recipients is here: http://www.sloan.org/fellowships/2015-sloan-research-fellows/

Assistant Professor Vladimir Manucharyan has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. His proposal, entitled “Realizing the ultrastrong coupling regime of quantum electrodynamics using high-impedance Josephson superconducting circuits,” will receive five years of funding. NSF funds research in science and engineering through grants, contracts and cooperative agreements.

For more information on NSF Awards visit: http://www.nsf.gov/about/