Redish to be Awarded 2013 Oersted Medal

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Published: Friday, August 31 2012 11:11

Edward (Joe) Redish will be awarded the 2013 Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers, at their national meeting in New Orleans, next January. This prestigious medal recognizes those who have had an outstanding, widespread and lasting impact on the teaching of physics.

Professor Redish joined the department in 1968 after receiving his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from MIT. For the past 20 years his research effort has focused on physics education with an emphasis on the role of student expectations and understanding the kinds of difficulties physics students have with problem solving from introductory to upper division physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the AAAS, and the Washington Academy of Science and has received awards for his work in education from the Washington Academy of Science, the Maryland Association for Higher Education, Dickinson College, Vanderbilt University, and the Robert A. Millikan Medal from the AAPT. 

Johnpierre Paglione Awarded the 2012 Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship

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Published: Friday, August 31 2012 11:09

Assistant Professor Johnpierre Paglione has received the 2012 Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding personal effort and expertise in physics as well as dedicated service to the UMD Department of Physics. The Fellowship, established in 2001, honors Dr. Richard A. Ferrell, a deeply-respected physicist who joined the University in 1953, served 40 years, and remained active in the department even after his retirement. Dr. Ferrell died in 2005 at his nearby University Park home.

Professor Paglione is a condensed matter experimentalist and a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials (CNAM). His research interests include cuprate and iron-based superconductivity and magnetism, quantum criticality and strongly correlated electron phenomena, and the new field of topological insulator research. He will give a physics colloquium on September 18 at 4 pm in room 1410 entitled Quantum Materials: From Superconductors to Insulators... and Back!

Sarah Eno Noted in Washingtonian Magazine

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Published: Friday, August 31 2012 11:07

Professor Sarah Eno was noted in the September 2012 Washingtonian magazine, in a column called “Guest List – A monthly roundup of people we’d like to have over for drinks, food, and conversation.” Eno was first on the list, ahead of Robert Griffin III, the Redskins’ new quarterback. Eno was described as “part of a team of University of Maryland scientists working on the complicated machinery that recently discovered the Higgs boson.”

Dan Lathrop Receives 2012 Stanley Corrsin Award

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Published: Wednesday, July 11 2012 09:41

Dan Lathrop was selected as the recipient of the American Physical Society's 2012 Stanley Corrsin Award. The award was established to recognize and encourage a particularly influential contribution to fundamental fluid dynamics. 

Professor Lathrop was chosen for, "his striking observations of flow in a quantum fluid including detection of counter-flow that confirmed the two-fluid picture of quantum fluid, observation and characterization of reconnections of quantized vortices, and the discovery of an inverse-cube tail in the velocity distribution of superfluid turbulence."

Professor Hadley Re-Elected Chair of US CMS Collaboration Board

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Published: Tuesday, July 03 2012 10:47

Nicholas Hadley was elected to a third term as the Chair of the US CMS Collaboration Board. In this position, he will represent and lead the nearly 700 scientists, from 49 universities and national laboratories in the United States, who are members of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The United States is the largest national group in the CMS collaboration. US groups have made significant contributions to nearly every aspect of the detector throughout all phases of the experiment including construction, installation and physics analysis.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN smashes protons together at close to the speed of light with four times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now. Some of the collision energy is turned into mass, creating new particles, which can be observed in the CMS particle detector. CMS data is analyzed by scientists around the world to build up a picture of what happened at the heart of the collision. This experiment will help us answer questions such as: "what is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it?" and "what gives everything substance?" Such research increases our basic understanding and may also spark new technologies.