Category: News

GPAS News Articles

How To Submit Your Content to the GPAS Website

Photos, promos, papers, and more: anything you want can be shared with the Notre Dame GPAS community using our new content submission form! (must be signed in with your ND Google account). We know forms can be scary and confusing sometimes, so here’s a walk through exactly how to get your content featured on our website.

How it works:

Posting on the website is a great way to get involved with GPAS media, with no commitment required. After you submit, we’ll edit, tag, and post your content as necessary. We’ll also include author attribution on all the photos and articles we post, so feel free to flex your artistic skills and writing prowess as much as you like; the credit is all yours! Here’s the things you can submit using our form right now:

Event Flyers

That beautiful flyer you made deserves more than just getting taped to the stairwell door. Put it up on our Events page so people anywhere can see it! Upload a PDF in portrait orientation, and we’ll add it to the rotation of upcoming event listings on our site.

Announcements

Exciting new projects, awards, updates, collaborations, anything! Share your big news with the GPAS community and get some writing practice while you’re at it! You choose the title, write your article, and even submit photos if you like. Your article will be posted on our News page for all to see!

Photos

Show off your photos from GPAS or other Physics & Astronomy Department events! We’ll collect the images you upload and put them all together in an Event Recap article. Our upload form is a little finicky right now because it can only handle you uploading 10 photos at once. If you’ve got more than that, just fill out the form again!

Student & Faculty Spotlight

There are a lot of awesome people in our department. Spotlight gives you a chance to introduce them to us all and showcase what makes them great! First, choose someone you think is especially awesome. Share their accomplishments with us, just let us know why you think they’re so cool. Once they’ve been nominated, we’ll reach out to them to learn more and write an article that shows why they deserve their very own Spotlight.

Paper Spotlight

A journal club for everyone! Did you or someone you know submit a paper recently? Was there an abstract on arXiv that struck your fancy? Want the opportunity to write a summary of a classic paper in your field? Maybe you’ll help others understand it better. Maybe you’ll even help *you* understand it better! Give us some information about the paper, and a summary in your own words, and we’ll feature your article on our News page.

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.

Student Spotlight – James Kelly

In high school, I scoffed at the idea of putting more effort into my humanities classes because I thought a smart person like me should pursue only the hardest subjects, and surely those were not them! In college, still interested in science but only pretending to have my priorities straight in a new world of opportunity, my scientific endeavor continued. I just wanted to do something challenging, without much thought as to why I was doing it.

Notre Dame physics made sense given my background, but the program has ultimately steered me away from the thing I ostensibly came here to do and altered my course in ways I never anticipated. My advisor, Maxime Brodeur, has been every bit the positive mentor one could hope to have in graduate school and that I was searching for during my second year. And my project, a two-pronged approach to measuring exotic atomic masses of relevance to the astrophysical rapid neutron capture (r) process through instrument development and Penning trap mass spectrometry, has been (mostly) captivating and rewarding. But I’ve realized now in my fifth year that it’s not so much doing science that I enjoy, but communicating its significance. Given that I think everyone should regard science’s methodology and culture as highly as I do, I want to work as its advocate to promote scientific thinking in areas beyond fundamental research.

After graduating and hopefully whiling away at least some of the six-month grace period before my undergraduate student loans come due, I’ll make myself useful somewhere between those doing research of the type I will have left behind and those in government who have to confront its findings.