Faculty, Staff, Student and Alumni Awards & Notes

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Published: Monday, January 08 2024 09:24

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

Department News

• A memorial symposium commemorating the life and scientific career of Charles W. Misner was held on November 11. Videos and slides from the day can be found here.

Faculty and Staff

• Thomas Antonsen received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize of the American Physical Society (APS).
• Alberto Belloni was quoted in New Scientist.
• Alessandra Buonanno received the Oskar Klein Medal.
• Sankar Das Sarma described How AI and ML Will Affect Physics in Physics magazine.
• Sarah Eno was lected to the leadership track of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF).
• Victor Galitski was quoted in Nature.
• Sylvester "Jim" Gates gave an online presentation, "C.S. Wu: Mandated Observer of Nature's Secrets" as part of the Inaugural International Frontier Science Forum of The School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering at Hainan University. Also participating was Bill Phillips. 
  • Gates also spoke at the Joint Mathematics Meeting 2024 on the future of mathematics as it relates to the impact of IT/computationally enabled
    technology.
• Work by a collaboration including Michael Gullans was featured in Phys.org.
• Wendell Hill was featured in Physics magazine.
• Wolfgang Losert was named an MPower Professor.
• Howard Milchberg was awarded the APS Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science,
• Kartik Srinivasan was quoted in Phys.org.
• Nicole Yunger Halpern was quoted in Phys.org and received the Mary Somerville Medal and Prize.

  Students

• John Labbate was commended for his poster at the APS Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) meeting in Denver.
• Physics magazine Junheng Tao, Mingshu Zhao and Ian Spielman 
• Simone Pierpaoli was mentioned in The Diamondback.
• Isaac Sherwood was quoted in Maryland Today.

Alumni

• William Raphael “Raph” Hix (B.S., '89) was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
• Samuel Lofland (Ph.D., '95) was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
• Michael Shay (Ph.D., '98) was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Losert Named MPower Professor

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Published: Thursday, November 16 2023 10:07

Wolfgang Losert has been named an MPower Professor.  Three professors from UMD and from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB)  received this distinction from the University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State (MPower), which recognizes, incentivizes, and fosters collaborations between the two institutions.

Losert holds a joint appointment in physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST). He also holds an affiliate appointment in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, andan adjunct appointment with the University of Maryland Medical System's Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is co-director of the National Cancer Institute-University of Maryland Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research. Losert's research — supported by $2 million-plus a year in funding for the past seven years — is at the convergence of physics, biology, and artificial intelligence and focuses on the nonlinear dynamics of living systems.
Wolfgang Losert. Credit: UMD/Lisa Helfert.

In his research, Losert aims to discover emergent dynamic properties of complex systems at the interface of physics and biology. He currently leads a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research that transformed our understanding of how cells sense their physical environment. He also serves as co-principal investigator on a Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative center grant from the National Institutes of Health focused on information processing in sensory brain circuits.

Losert actively fosters cross-disciplinary interactions and new research and educational opportunities on campus and beyond. He helped launch and currently co-leads the American Physical Society Group on Data Science. He was part of a trans-university initiative of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (called NEXUS) that developed new science and math courses for biology majors and pre-health care students that are being widely adopted. He led the development of and co-directs the NCI-UMD Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research, which provides UMD faculty members and graduate students the opportunity to tackle pressing problems in cancer research in collaboration with National Cancer Institute experts. 

A Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Losert joined UMD in 2000 as an assistant professor and served as an associate dean in CMNS (2014-22) and as interim IPST director (2019-20). He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the City College of the City University of New York in 1998 and his diplom in applied physics from the Technical University of Munich in Germany in 1995.

Also selected were Jessica Magidson and Steven Prior from UMD and Lisa Berlin, Osamah Saeedi and James Polli from UMB.

Buonanno to Receive Oskar Klein Medal

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Published: Friday, November 10 2023 02:46

Research Professor Alessandra Buonanno will receive the 2023 Oskar Klein Medal by the Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Each year, a distinguished physicist is invited to deliver the Memorial Lecture and to receive the Oskar Klein medal. Buonanno will give the Memorial Lecture on “Gravitational-Wave Astronomy: Theoretical Advances and Challenges” on November 23 at the AlbaNova Center in Stockholm.Alessandra Buonanno © Markus Scholz for the Leopoldina

Buonanno is the director of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity Department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics  (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam.

Buonanno's research has spanned several topics in gravitational wave theory, data analysis and cosmology. She is a Principal Investigator of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and her waveform modeling of cosmological events has been crucial in the experiment’s many successes. Her work has merited election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

In 2018, Buonanno received the Leibniz Prize, Germany's prestigious research award. Other accolades include the Galileo Galilei Medal of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the Tomalla Prize, the Dirac Medal (with Thibault Damour, Frans Pretorius, and Saul Teukolsky) and the Balzan Prize (with Damour).

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Buonanno, Charlie Misner, Peter Shawhan and others detailed UMD's contributions to gravitational studies in a 2016 forum, A Celebration of Gravitational Waves. 

Originally published by the Max Plank Institute: https://www.aei.mpg.de/1092354/alessandra-buonanno-awarded-oskar-klein-medal

Eno Elected to Leadership Line

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Published: Friday, November 10 2023 00:53

Sarah Eno has been elected to the leadership track of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields (APS DPF). She will serve as vice-chair from 2024-26, followed by two years as division chair.Eno has worked on several collider experiments. In 1993, she joined UMD as an Assistant Professor, and began research at the DØ experiment at Fermilab.  The discovery of the top quark—announced by the CDF and DØ teams in 1995—was a milestone in particle physics. Eno’s precise measurement of the decay width and mass of the electroweak W boson helped predict the mass of the top quark. 

Sarah Eno

Since 1999, Eno has worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 2012, CERN announced experimental verification of the Higgs boson, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, whose 1960s calculations determined that mass could not exist without the presence of such a particle.  Since 2020 she has participated in the development of experiments for a potential new electron-positron collider at CERN (FCC-ee). She is also exploring improvement and simulations of calorimeters to better study the momentums of jets and of missing transverse energy, and studies of radiation damage in plastic scintillators.

Eno is a University of Maryland Distinguished ScholarTeacher and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society (APS).

Milchberg Receives APS Schawlow Prize

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Published: Wednesday, October 25 2023 05:33

Professor Howard Milchberg has been awarded the 2024 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, presented by the American Physical Society (APS), for “pioneering contributions in the fields of plasma optics, guiding the ultra-intense laser beams, and developing compact, high-gradient laser-driven accelerators”. Howard Milchberg

Over the past year, Milchberg has had numerous research successes.  Recent results have included:

• Record all-optical laser-based acceleration of electrons to 5 billion electron volts, published in the September 2022 issue of Physical Review X.
• Demonstration of a continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air by creating an optical guiding method using auxiliary ultrashort laser pulses to sculpt fiber optic waveguides in the air itself.  This allows high-power laser beams to be guided without using common optical fibers made of strands of glass that can be damaged by high power beams.  This experiment was published in the April 2023 issue of Optica.
• Setting a record with a nearly 50-meter long air waveguide in an effort to use pulsed air waveguiding to temporarily transfigure thin air into a fiber optic cable, published in the Jan.  2023 issue of Physical Review X.
• Recognition for his Lab for Intense Laser-Matter Interactions by being chosen as one of ten LaserNetUS  nodes, providing funding for collaboration with US and international researchers

The APS Honors Program recognizes outstanding achievements in research, education, and public service.  The Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science “recognizes contributions to basic research using lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interactions with light.”  Previous winners include College Park Professors Chris Monroe and Bill Phillips. 

Original story: https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/professor-milchberg-to-receive-aps-award