Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

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Published: Friday, January 17 2020 05:56

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, authored books, began new positions and more.

Faculty and Staff Awards

• Steve Anlage – Graduate Advising Award 

• Maissam Barkeshli – Richard A. Ferrell Fellowship

• Mark Conners – Chair's Award 

• Janet Das Sarma – Chair's Certificate of Excellence 

• Sankar Das Sarma – Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researcher

• Zohreh Davoudi – DOE Early Career Research Funding and 2019 Sloan Research Fellowship

• Dennis Drew – American Physical Society Outstanding Referee

• Alexey Gorshkov – Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

• Mohammad Hafezi – Blavatnik Award Finalist

• Donna Hammer – Chair's Certificate of Excellence 

• Daniel Lathrop – Distinguished Scholar-Teacher 

• Vlad Manucharyan – Google Faculty Research Award and DOE Early Career Research Funding

• Howard Milchberg – American Physical Society Outstanding Referee

• Chris Monroe – Willis Lamb Award and Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researcher

• Jay Deep Sau – American Physical Society Outstanding Referee

• Peter Shawhan – American Physical Society Fellow

• Ian Spielman – Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researcher

• Kristin Stenson – Chair's Certificate of Excellence 

• Samantha Suplee – Sibylle Sampson Award 

• Ellen Williams – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Michigan State Distinguished Alumni Award

 Student Awards

• Batoul Banihashemi – Ralph Myers Award

• Dawid Brzeminski – Ralph Myers Award

• Leonard Campanello – Monroe H. Martin Graduate Research Fellowship

• Daniel Campbell – Ann G. Wylie Semester Dissertation Fellowship 

• Liz Friedman – Leon A. Herreid Science Fellowship

• Hong Nhung Nguyen – Ruth M. Davis Fellowship

• Pranava Jayanti – Kulkarni Fellowship

• Soubhik Kumar – Monroe H. Martin Graduate Research Fellowship

• Jillian Kunze – Merrill Presidential Scholarship

• Kungang Li – Ralph Myers Award

• Fangli Liu - Ann G. Wylie Semester Dissertation Fellowship

• Dalia Ornelas Huerta – Monroe H. Martin Graduate Research Fellowship

• Spandan Pathak – Ralph Myers Award

• Abu Saleh Musa Patoary – Ralph Myers Award

• Nicholas Poniatowski – Barry Goldwater Scholarship, Merrill Presidential Scholarship and Ralph Myers Award

• Andrew Shaw – Joseph and Dorothy Sucher Graduate Prize in Relativistic Theoretical Physics

• Ana Valdes-Curiel – Ruth M. Davis Fellowship

• Yidan Wang – Ruth M. Davis Fellowship

• Zhiyu Yin – Leon A. Herreid Science Fellowship and Thomas G. Mason Interdisciplinary Physics Fund

• Mark Zic – Barry Goldwater Scholarship

 Group Efforts

• LHCb’s discovery of CP violation was named a Physics World Breakthrough of the Year finalist. More

• The European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize went to the DØ and CDF collaborations, which include Nick Hadley, Sarah Eno, Drew Baden, Greg Sullivan, and Kara Hoffman. More

• The Society of Physics Students won an Outstanding Chapter Award from the SPS National Office. More

• A team led by Chris Monroe won the overall Invention of the Year Award at Innovate Maryland 2019 for “Cryogenic Ion Trapping and Storage System for Quantum Information.” Monroe’s early-stage quantum computing company IonQ also took home the prize for Startup of the Year. More

Alumni Notes

• Damian Blazy (B.S. ’02) was named a principal in the Los Angeles office of OpenGate Capital.

• Joel Dahlin (Ph.D. ’15) received the AIP Publishing Ronald Davidson Award.

• Alexei Fedotov (Ph.D. ’97) received the Science & Technology Award of Brookhaven National Lab.

• Mark Harley (B.S. ’07) joined the faculty of Watchung Hills Regional High School in Warren, N.J., as a physics teacher. 

• Ruth Kastner (B.S. ’82, M.S. ’92) published Corralling quantum cats: from Cheshire cat to Schrodinger's cat, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2019.

• James P. Lavine (Ph.D. ’71) published Time-Dependent Quantum Mechanics of Two-Level Systems, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2019.

• John Martyn (B.S. ’19) received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Ralph Myers Award.

• Thomas Mason (B.S. ’89) was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• Ana Maria Rey (Ph.D. ’04) was named Blavatnik National Laureate in Physical Sciences & Engineering.

• Gareth Roberg-Clark (Ph.D. ’19) received a NERSC Early Career HPC Achievement Award.

Summer Camps Introduce High School Girls to Physics

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Published: Friday, January 17 2020 05:56

Since its inception in 1988, over 1,500 students have participated in the University of Maryland’s Summer Girls physics program for rising 9th through 12th graders. Last summer alone, more than 50 young students came to campus for one or two weeks to explore concepts from classical and modern physics, conduct hands-on laboratory experiments, and learn about careers in physics. The students also met and spoke with physics professors and graduate students, listened to interesting lectures, and toured research laboratory tours. 

The program is mostly funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation through the Physics Frontier Center at the Joint Quantum Institute. Students paid only $25 to participate last year. Participants of the program, which is directed by Donna Hammer, have come not only from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., but also from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and all over the world. Graduates have gone on to become engineers, doctors, computer scientists and, of course, physicists. 

In Memoriam

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Published: Friday, January 17 2020 05:56

It is with much sadness that the Department of Physics announces the passing of several members of our community.

Janet Das Sarma (1971-2019) managed the Condensed Matter Theory Center for the last decade. She received the department’s Staff Excellence Award in October. More

Leona Dunklee (1926-2019) was an account clerk in the Department of Physics who supported the electronic development group and was active in planning departmental events.

Hans R. Griem (1928-2019), a noted expert in high-temperature plasmas and spectroscopy, served on the UMD faculty from 1957 to 1994. He was a consultant with Los Alamos National Laboratory. More

Udayaditya “Yudi” Konwar (1997-2019), an international student from Assam, India, would have been a junior physics major this year.

Don Langenberg (1932-2019) was a physicist, the Chancellor of the University System of Maryland from 1990 to 2002, and in recent years an active voice for education at the National Academies. More

Susanne Misner (1933-2019) is survived by her husband, Professor Emeritus Charles Misner. The couple donated proceeds from the sale of correspondence with Stephen Hawking to establish the department’s Weber Endowment for Gravitational Physics.

Lawrence A. Schmid (1928-2019) was a longtime NASA physicist who contributed to the Apollo Lunar Landing. He was a generous donor to undergraduate education in UMD’s Department of Physics.  

Joseph Sucher (1930-2019) was a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and the poet laureate of the department. He established the Joseph and Dorothy Sucher Graduate Prize in Relativistic Theoretical Physics. More

Peter Hawley Walpole (1947-2019) was a physicist who worked on the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (CREAM) and Boron And Carbon Cosmic rays in the Upper Stratosphere (BACCUS) experiments. 

Gaurang Yodh (1928-2019) was a UMD Physics Professor from 1961 to 1988 before moving to the University of California, Irvine. More

Recent Alumnus Zachary Eldredge Studies Solar Energy as ORISE Fellow

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Published: Friday, January 17 2020 02:56

As a student, Zachary Eldredge (Ph.D. ’19, physics) examined the use of quantum mechanics to improve measurements.

“If you nZach Eldredge. Photo by Faye Levine.eed to know the difference in some quantity between two points, a common method is to measure the quantity at each point and then subtract,” Eldredge explained. “Instead, we developed methods to measure the difference directly. Our methods are more accurate because we only measure once, not twice.”

After graduating last May, Eldredge took this expertise and his strong physics foundation to the Department of Energy’s Solar Technologies Office, which aims to make solar energy less expensive and more accessible and increase the amount of renewable energy in the United States. He spent seven months working in the office as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow and is now a technology manager.

“The process of how technologies progress from lab science to usable products is really interesting to me and was important to my quantum research, as quantum technology is trying to make that same leap at the moment,” he said. “In addition, physics has been a wonderful foundation. A good physics education prepares you to pick out the relevant patterns and generalize knowledge really quickly, and it's been a great help in giving me the background to get up to speed on all kinds of other technologies.”

Eldredge knew early on in his studies that he was interested in finding a science policy job to align with his interests in climate, renewable energy and technology development. 

“I really wanted to shift gears from my academic work into something more climate focused, and the ORISE fellowship provided a great opportunity.”

During his time at Maryland, Eldredge co-authored nine publications, including three first-author papers published in the journals Physical Review A and Physical Review Letters. 

“I’m proud to say that two of Zach’s papers are the highlights of my own research over the past few years,” said Alexey Gorshkov, Eldredge’s advisor who is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Physics and a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “In fact, these two papers are so promising that we filed patents for the corresponding ideas, all having to do with the harnessing of the peculiarities of quantum mechanics for technologies such as powerful computing, secure communication and superior sensing.”

In addition to his work in the lab, Eldredge served as president of the social activism group Science for the People UMD and as a member of the Graduate Student Government. 

“Not only is Zach an excellent physicist, he was also an excellent citizen of the department,” said Steve Rolston, professor of physics and department chair. “He was one of the most active members of our self-organized graduate student committee, which strives to make graduate school as positive an experience as possible.” 

Eldredge also participated in public outreach activities, such as the American Physical Society’s Congressional Visits Day, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, and UMD’s Maryland Day. 

“I felt I had a duty as a publicly funded scientist at a major public university to reach out and talk to people, because the knowledge I gained there belongs to everyone,” Eldredge said. “When we discover amazing things, it is on us to communicate about them to the public.”

Written by Chelsea Torres

Fifth Edition of “Exploring Quantum Physics” to Launch on Coursera

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Published: Tuesday, January 14 2020 08:55

Charles Clark and Victor Galitski will launch the fifth edition of their Coursera class on quantum physics Jan. 20, 2020. Alireza Parhizkar, a UMD graduate student will serve as teaching assistant.

“The course begins by establishing the conceptual grounds of quantum mechanics and promises an exciting journey,” says Parhizkar, who joined Galitski’s research group in the summer of 2019. “It fulfills this promise by immersing the learner in advanced subjects of quantum physics, like superconductivity and path integrals, and illustrating them with colorful exercises.”   Two JQI Fellows will launch the fifth edition of "Exploring Quantum Physics" on Coursera Jan. 20. (Credit: Anna Bogatin)

The free course, titled “Exploring Quantum Physics,” explains topics in quantum physics at a level appropriate for an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate student. The previous four editions had a total of about 100,000 enrollees, with roughly 2,000 people completing the course. “That’s a good number for a massive open online course, or MOOC,” says Clark, who is an Adjunct Professor of Physics, a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and a Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Clark adds that the new edition of the course has a revised grading system as well as updated homework and exam questions.

“Exploring Quantum Physics” consists of eight weeks of video lectures, with a number of five- to fifteen-minute videos per week. The videos include voluntary ungraded quizzes, which automatically pause the presentation so that students have an opportunity to answer relevant questions. There are also weekly homework assignments—some will include reading historical papers by influential early quantum scientists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr—as well as a final exam. “We tried to strike a balance between providing a historical perspective on the early development of quantum physics and modern concepts,” says Galitski, who holds the Chesapeake Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD).

An advantage of MOOCs is that the course material is available to anyone, including some students who are younger than traditional undergraduates. Khadija Niazi and her twin brother Muhammad, who grew up in Pakistan, were 13 years old when they enrolled in an earlier edition of the course. Khadija, who once spoke about her experience with MOOCs at the World Economic Forum, says that she “thoroughly enjoyed that course [e]specially because of the peer's help and Charles Clark's constant help and encouragement in the forums.” Before beginning the quantum physics course, the twins had completed some introductory physics classes on the site and learned some calculus from videos on YouTube. Muhammad says that they wanted “to get a taste of what lies ahead.”

Both Niazi siblings stayed in contact with Clark after completing the class. Muhammad, who went on to publish his first experimental physics paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science when he was 16, says he will probably take the new edition of the course to solidify his understanding of the content.

Michael Winer, a physics graduate student at UMD, took an earlier edition of the course when he was a 10th grader at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland because he hoped to do physics research over the summer. “By far the greatest thing that came out of my taking the course was that I contacted professor Galitski and did research with him for two summers,” Winer says. “This was my first real research experience, and taught me a lot about the scientific process.” That work led Winer to win the Intel Science Talent Search competition in 2015, earning him a prize of $150,000 and a meeting with President Obama.

“Exploring Quantum Physics” is now open for enrollment. To learn more about the course and to see a detailed syllabus, please visit the landing page at Coursera.

Original story by by Jillian Kunze

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