2024-2025 Departmental Awards Announced!

The Department of Physics & Astronomy has announced the recipients for this year’s graduate student awards. Four awards are given out annually: two for Distinguished Research, which covers outstanding research currently performed by graduate students in the department; one Research and Dissertation Award acknowledging the successful completion and defense of an excellent dissertation; and one Graduate Leadership and Service Award, which showcases the contributions of a graduate student leader for the betterment of the department. The research awards were presented to two Condensed Matter students, Resham Regmi (“for the growth of high-quality single crystals of altermagnetic materials”) and Nileema Sharma (“for atomic-scale visualization of putative spin-triplet superconductivity, Josephson coupling frustration, and the development of new scanning probe microscopy methods”). The distinguished dissertation award was given to Nathan Chalus in Condensed Matter “for innovative studies of skyrmions by small-angle neutron scattering, and especially collective skyrmion matter behavior under the influence of a magnon current”. Finally, the student service award was presented to Alex Thomas in Astronomy “for being a champion of the department, and for his encouragement, and infectious and steadfast passion and dedication to improving the lives of everyone around him”. If you see any of these students, be sure to congratulate and celebrate them and their accomplishments this week!

From left to right in the featured image: Prof. Anna Simon-Robertson, Resham Regmi, Nileema Sharma, Alex Thomas, Nathan Chalus, and Prof. Morten Eskildsen.

The 2025 GPAS Conference

The annual GPAS Conference, held this year on April 16th 2025, invites graduate students from all subfields to showcase their thesis work and practice their presentation skills, either in the form of a ten-minute talk during the regular colloquium hour or as a poster in the following poster session. The colloquium presenters this year were spread over three of the four department subfields, with one nuclear talk, one condensed matter talk, and one astronomy talk. Thomas Bailey, a sixth year nuclear physics graduate student, discussed his ongoing thesis work on quantifying and using uranium ore concentrations as a fingerprint for mines around the world. Lili Vajtai, a second year condensed matter student, showed her work on the applications of magnetism and ferrofluids in both medicine and industry. Jared Kolecki (featured in the post photo), a third year astronomy student, described his methods for using the chemical abundances in a star to characterize the possible types of planets in other solar systems. Following the presentations, accompanied with light refreshments during the weekly colloquium tea, other students presented posters to their peers on their recent progress towards their thesis. Excellent work to all presenters at this year’s conference, and congratulations on the free department mug for the speakers!