The University of Maryland chapter of the Society of Physics Students (SPS) has won an Outstanding Chapter Award from the SPS National Office. This is the sixth time the chapter has been recognized for its excellence as a top-tier student-led physical sciences organization, a designation given to only 15 percent of all SPS chapters at colleges and universities in the United States and internationally.

The Society of Physics Students (SPS) is a professional association designed for students and membership is open to anyone interested in physics and related fields. SPS operates within the American Institute of Physics (AIP), an umbrella organization for professional physical science societies.

The SPS chapter at University of Maryland is advised by Director of Education Programs & Public Engagement Donna Hammer and is led by student officers.

SPS chapters are evaluated on their level of interaction with the campus community, the professional physics community, the public, and with SPS national programs. The Outstanding Chapter Award recognizes high levels of outreach as well as unique approaches to fulfilling the mission of SPS to “help students transform themselves into contributing members of the professional community.”

Physics graduate student Freddy Cisneros has been awarded the best oral presentation award in Physics and Astronomy at the annual SACNAS conference in San Antonio, Texas for his work on using machine learning to study rare events in condensed matter systems. The Presentation Awards recognize the next generation of scientists and STEM leaders for exemplary science. Cisneros is currently performing this work with the Tiwary research group in the Institute for Physical Science & Technology and the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and is currently the UMD SACNAS chapter president.

Congratulations to eight graduate students who have received awards from the Graduate School for the 2018-2019 Academic Year!

Congratulations to Siddhartha Harmalkar who has received the 2018 Society of Physics Students (SPS) Leadership Scholarship. The award recognizes outstanding academic achievements and exemplary leadership in the SPS community.  

Harmalkar is a junior at University of Maryland and studies math and physics.  He has been an active member of SPS since freshman year and has just completed his sophomore year when he led UMD's chapter as SPS president.  His research is in Lattice QCD in the Quarks, Hadron and Nuclei Theory Group at UMD.  

Read full announcement in Society of Physics Students.

Jacob BringewattCongratulations to Jacob Bringewatt for receiving a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF).  Established in 1991, the fellowship was devised “to train and produce the next generation of leaders in computational science.”  The 2018-2019 incoming class includes twenty-six awardees from all over the country.

Bringewatt was a researcher with the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) while a physics undergraduate, and will continue this work as he begins his graduate studies here in the fall. He is currently working with co-advisors Stephen Jordan and Bill Dorland. In February of this year, he was the first author on a paper with Jordan, Dorland and NIST researcher Alan Mink comparing the performance of quantum adiabatic computation with local stoquastic Hamiltonians to classical simulation of those problems with diffusion Monte Carlo. 

Full list of DOE CSGF recipients