Our very own Laurie McNeil has been named as the 2025 John David Jackson Excellence in Graduate Physics Education awardee!

From AAPT’s website announcement:

The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) has announced that the John David Jackson Excellence in Graduate Physics Education Award for 2025 will be awarded to Laurie Elizabeth McNeil, Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Regarding her selection to receive this award, McNeil said, “I am deeply honored to receive this recognition of my efforts on behalf of graduate education. I have been privileged to be in a position throughout my career to work to enhance education in physics and related fields at all levels, to help all students succeed in applying their talents and training in whatever area they choose.”

Find the full announcement here.

Congratulations, Laurie!!!

A new review article by Tyndall et al is featured on the cover of the Journal of American Dental Association.
The article describes “Four emerging technologies with promise”, 2 out of those 4 come from Otto Zhou’s lab: intraoral tomosynthesis and multisource CBCT.

Check it out here.

Zack is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, to carry out research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The fellowship supports postdoctoral fellows performing impactful research in MPS fields while broadening the participation of groups that are underrepresented in the mathematical and physical sciences.

Congratulations, Zack!!!

You can find more information on Zack’s award here.

See also feature in the Tar Heel Up Close here.

James T. Dobbins III, PhD, FAAPM, FSPIE, BSPHYS ’78 (UNC-CH), received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 from the Society of Directors of Academic Medical Physics Programs, Inc (SDAMPP). Dobbins, now retired, spent his entire 37-year career on the faculty and in senior administration at Duke University, where he is Associate Vice Provost Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Radiology, Biomedical Engineering, and Physics. He is an internationally recognized scholar in the physics of imaging, both theoretical and experimental, whose research has contributed to several FDA-cleared diagnostic imaging techniques now in clinical use in hundreds of hospitals worldwide. He was the Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Medical Physics at Duke, now one of the top three such programs in the US. He was also part of the small team of senior administrators that designed, built, and launched Duke’s joint venture university in China – Duke Kunshan University (DKU) – which offers both graduate and undergraduate degrees to a global community of students; he also served as Secretary of the DKU Board of Trustees. He is past-president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and co-founder and past-president of SDAMPP. He won the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award for best publication in the journal Medical Physics and is a Fellow of AAPM and SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics. He and his wife, Catherine N. Dobbins, BA ’77 (former senior management at UNC-TV), live in Durham, NC and enjoy spending time with their son, Scott, daughter-in-law Summer, and grandson Theo in New York City.

You can find his profile page here.

Sarah Vickers, one of our majors, won the competition for Best Undergraduate Talk at the recent Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society (SESAPS) meeting at Eastern Kentucky University. SESAPS holds meetings to advance and spread knowledge of physics in the Southeastern United States.

Sarah’s talk on Calibration System and Magnetic Shielding for NuDot was selected among 47 participants.

You can find more information here.

Also, look out for the upcoming, Fall 2023 edition of our News Magazine for a feature article by Sarah.

Congratulations, Sarah!

Congratulations to Adrienne Erickcek and Christian Iliadis on being elected as Fellows of the American Physical Society!

Christian’s citation reads:
“For pioneering direct measurements of stellar nuclear reactions and fundamental contributions to our understanding of stellar evolution and explosions,”

Adrienne’s citation reads:
“For theoretical contributions spanning cosmology, including inflation, cosmic acceleration, and dark matter, with a key focus on understanding primordial density perturbations on small distance scales”

The APS Fellowship Program recognizes members who may have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one’s professional peers. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the APS’s membership is recognized by their peers for election to the status of Fellow of the APS. More information here.

Congratulations!!!

One of our most distinguished graduates, Adam Falk (BS 1987), will be the orator at the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises at Harvard on May 23rd. Adam got his PhD at Harvard in 1991 and subsequently joined the physics faculty at Johns Hopkins, eventually becoming Dean of Arts & Sciences there. From 2010 – 2017 he was President of Williams College, and is now the President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The latest edition of our Department’s News Magazine is now available online!

You can find it here.

Our distinguished colleague Professor Robert Janssens has been awarded this year’s APS Division of Nuclear Physics Distinguished Service Award.

The citation reads: “For his exemplary service to the DNP, particularly his extended leadership in the chair line and the nuclear physics community, including as the Director of the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory and as Director of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory.”

Congratulations Robert!

Carl, who will join our Department in January 2023, is one of 20 recipients of the 2022 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering.
(see the announcement on the College website, reproduced below). The fellowship recognizes innovative early-career researchers and includes $875,000 to aid in each fellow’s research for five years.

“We are very proud of Carl for receiving this prestigious fellowship and very excited to have him joining us at UNC,” said Frank Tsui, chair of our Department. “Carl is an innovative researcher, a capable and caring adviser of postdocs and students at all levels and a charismatic communicator and teacher. His research and expertise in stellar dynamics, gravitational-wave physics and computational astrophysics will significantly strengthen our department, linking and enhancing several areas of excellence in gravitational physics, astrophysics and astronomy, computational physics and nuclear physics and our Institute for Cosmology, Subatomic Matter and Symmetry (CoSMS).”

Rodriguez’s work focuses on gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime that were first observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. He is particularly interested in the dynamics and evolution of stars and star clusters, and what the gravitational waves they create can tell us about stars and galaxies across cosmic time.

“Stars are not fixed on the night sky, and their movements over billions of years create some of the most exciting astronomical events, from gravitational waves to gamma-ray bursts to supernova,” Rodriguez said. “The Packard Fellowship will provide our group with the freedom to develop the next generation of computational tools to explore this dynamical, high-energy frontier with unprecedented physical resolution.”

In his work, Rodriguez uses high-performance computing, including machines at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, to simulate the dynamics of star clusters to better understand how gravitational forces affect the evolution of binary stars and create gravitational waves.

In addition to the Packard Fellowship, Rodriguez won a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship and a Kaufman New Investigator Award in 2020. He joined the Carnegie Mellon physics faculty in the fall of 2020 after completing an ITC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard and a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT. He earned his doctoral degree from Northwestern University and his bachelor’s degree from Reed College.

“Each of the fellows in this year’s class is exceptional, and we’re excited to support them as they push the boundaries of discovery and innovation in their fields,” said Richard Alley, chair of the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering Advisory Panel and 1991 Packard Fellow. “We welcome them to the community of Packard Fellows and look forward to learning from them and helping them advance the frontiers of science and engineering for the good of all of us.”

The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering are designed to encourage innovative, blue-sky thinking by providing maximum flexibility and support to scientists and engineers early in their careers. This flexibility allows fellows to pursue trailblazing experimental research into critical issues like COVID-19 and climate change.

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is a competition where students present their graduate thesis work in three minutes. The competition, done as part of University Research week, celebrates doctoral or master’s research and is meant to cultivate presentation and research communication with non-specialist audiences. This year, Mackenna Wood earned the top prize, which includes $1000 and the opportunity to represent UNC at the national 3MT competition in 2023.

Wood’s research, conducted as part of Andrew Mann’s lab, focuses on measuring the ages of stars. To understand the prospects for life elsewhere in the universe, we must understand the changes planets undergo over millions or billions of years. However, these timescales are too long to wait for planets to evolve in real time. Instead, Wood focuses on planets in stellar associations: groups of stars that all formed at the same time. By assigning ages to these groups and the planets within them, Wood can build up a set of ‘snapshots’ of planets at different stages of change.

Most recently, Mackenna led the discovery and age-dating of a new association, MELANGE-4, finding that the group is 27 million years old and contains 6 planets (two of which she discovered) and represents an exciting new environment to study the evolution of stars and planets.

Each year, the Postdoctoral Awards for Research Excellence (PARE) are given in recognition of the research promise demonstrated by individual postdoctoral scholars. Meet this year’s recipients and learn about their areas of interest.

The PARE awards are open to postdoctoral scholars in all disciplines and are designed to assist them in their continued professional development by supporting the recipients in conference travel, purchasing books, lab materials, or engaging in other scholarly activities that directly enhance the individual’s professional growth. Each recipient receives a monetary award of $1,200 along with a plaque.

Aobo Li is a postdoctoral research associate and COSMS Fellow in our Department. He is described by his professors as a “rising star in the neutrino and nuclear physics community.” He leverages artificial intelligence to facilitate the experimental search of neutrino-less double-beta decay – part of an effort to explain why there was matter left after the Big Bang instead of only pure energy. His efforts to stay informed about new tools in machine learning (and immediately learn how to best apply them to experiments) has already led to several notable achievements. Li’s expertise and leadership provide a unique educational opportunity for UNC graduate and undergraduate students.