News
Department Outreach at a Sixers game
P&A graduate students Matt Lohr and Dan Beller contributed to the Philadelphia 76ers Science Night. Science Night featured interactive science exhibits on the concourse, a halftime performance by the Science Cheerleaders, in-game citizen science project for research on the Space Station.
Alison Sweeney awarded Sloan Fellowship
Assistant Prof. Alison Sweeney has been selected as a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Ocean Sciences. The Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving nominations for most of the very best early-career scientists from the United States and Canada. The award is announced in an advertisement in the Tuesday, Feb. 18 New York Times.
Penn graduate student wins postdoctoral fellowship
Daniel Beller, a graduate student in the group of Prof. Randy Kamien, has just been awarded the George F. Carrier fellowship in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science. This is an endowed honorific postdoctoral position in widely applied mathematics.
Rittenhouse Lecture
The 2014 Rittenhouse Lecture will be given this year by Prof. Scott Tremaine of the Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Tremaine's lecture entitled "Are planetary systems flat?" examines the observational and theoretical evidence upon which our understanding of how planetary systems are formed is based. The Rittenhouse Lecture will be delivered on Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 4pm in DRL A1.
Physics Outreach with Demonstrations
Laboratory and Classroom Demonstration Coordinator Bill Berner conducted his 17th annual holiday physics demonstration shows on Jan. 13 and 14. More than 500 students from local schools, along with a dozen home-schooled children, viewed the live demonstrations on electricity and magnetism as part of the SAS Science Outreach Initiative and Physics and Astronomy Department outreach program.
Liquid Crystal 'Gemstones'
Profs. Arjun Yodh, Tom Lubensky, and Peter Collings formed a team to do research led by postdoctoral fellow Joonwoo Jeong and graduate student Zoey Davidson. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a liquid crystal that dissolves in water shows, for the first time, that such crystals can form in the "columnar" phase leading to droplets (formed mostly of water) that look like gemstones.
Justin Khoury Appointed Penn Fellow
Justin Khoury, Associate Professor and incoming Undergraduate Chair of Physics & Astronomy, has been appointed a Penn Fellow for 2014. The Penn Fellows program provides leadership development to select Penn faculty members at their mid-career point. Penn Fellows build cross-campus alliances, meet distinguished academic leaders, think strategically about universities and university governance and consult with Penn's senior administrators.
Unexpected connections between hard and soft condensed matter physics
Profs. Tom Lubensky and Charles Kane have a paper on the cover of Nature Physics this month. Their work has established the mathematical relationship between the 'floppy modes' of isotatic lattices (like arrays of masses and springs that verge on mechanical instability) and the boundary modes that occur in quantum electronics systems like quantum Hall effect devices and topological insulators hence revealing unexpected connections between theories of hard and soft matter.
Andrea Liu named Simons Fellow for 2014
Prof. Andrea Liu has been named a Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics for Fall 2014. Prof. Liu will be supported for a sabbatical leave freeing her from teaching and administrative tasks to engage full time in research which will lead to intellectual stimulation of the field of condensed matter physics.
Gene Mele named to prestigious Professorship
Prof. Gene Mele will assume a 2014-2015 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship in the United Kingdom. The award from the Leverhulme Trust enables UK institutions to invite eminent researchers from overseas to enhance knowledge and skills of academic staff or the student body within the host institution. Prof. Mele's host institution will be the University of Loughborough but he will visit various other UK universities during a year-long sabbatical.