Category: Outreach and Alumni

Matthew Davenport ’06 is a PhD physicist turned science writer. If you are interested in such a career, view some of Matt’s writing and visualization samples on his website.

Matt also co-authored an article for Nature Nanotechnology in 2010. It is entitled “Graphene opens up to DNA,” published online 06 October 2010. doi:10.1038/nnano.2010.198 The work concerns the threading of pores in 2D graphene sheets by DNA strands.

While a student at Michigan Tech, Matt received the Ian W. Shepherd Award for most outstanding senior.

Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) efforts to explain why so much snow falls in the Arctic, despite the paucity of nuclei for ice crystals, was described in the NBCNews.com story “Let it Snow: How White Stuff Comes Down Days on End.”

From Tech Today.

Let it snow: How the white stuff comes down for days on end in the Arctic

Researchers at Michigan Technological University in Houghton set out to investigate the mystery of where snow in the Arctic comes from, and how it can fall so persistently in the region.

“Within a few hours, you basically purge the atmosphere of all those particles,” Raymond Shaw, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. “So how can it snow for days on end?”

Read more at NBC News Science, by Denise Chow.

In the News

CBS Detroit ran a news story about the origin of snowflakes, based on Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) research. See CBS Detroit.

From Tech Today.

Robert Nemiroff has been invited to speak in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History on Friday, 2014 January 3 at 6:15 pm at the invitation of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York. Lectures are held in the Kaufmann Theater on Central Park West.

This year he will be primarily presenting and describing the best astronomy videos featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day during the past two years: 2012 and 2013.

The science behind snow at Tech

According to Dr. Cantrell, associate professor of Physics and member of the Atmospheric Sciences interdepartmental PhD program, there are three reasons Tech gets so much snow.

The first reason is that it gets cold.

Read more at the Michigan Tech Lode, by Rand Silvers.

Three physics alumni reunited at the New Faculty Workshop, sponsored by the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers), the AAS (American Astronomical Society), APS Physics, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and NSF (National Science Foundation). Changgong Zhou, ’06, Lin Pan, ’08, and Haiying He, ’09, were the only cohorts that originated from the same school and knew each other personally.

Zhou, now at Lawrence Tech University, was a student of Edward Nadgorny working on aperture assisted laser direct write. Pan, now at Cedarville University, studied atomic physics with Donald Beck. He, now at Valparaiso University, did research on electron transport in molecular systems with Ravi Pandey.

The Workshop for New Physics and Astronomy Faculty was held on November 7-10, 2013, in the American Center for Physics, College Park, MD. AAPT sponsors programs to help new faculty become more effective educators and support their quest to gain tenure.

Vithal Tilvi, who graduated in 2006 with an MS in Physics from Michigan Tech, co-authored a paper in Nature on the most distant galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago.

UT, Texas A&M Astronomers Discover Universe’s Most Distant Galaxy

The paper’s lead author is Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and 2011 Hubble Fellow who previously was a postdoctoral research associate at Texas A&M under the mentorship of Texas A&M astrophysicist Casey Papovich, who is second author as well as current mentor to Tilvi. Ten other international institutions collaborated on the effort, from California to Massachusetts and Italy to Israel.

On a crisp, clear April night, Tilvi, Finkelstein and his graduate student, Mimi Song, sat behind a panel of computers in the control room of the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is perched atop the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano and houses the two largest optical and infrared telescopes in the world, each standing eight stories tall, weighing 300 tons and equipped with 10-meter-wide mirrors.

They detected only one galaxy during their two nights of observation at Keck, but it turned out to be the most distant ever confirmed.

Read more at Science, Texas A&M University. Watch the video of the interview with Tilvi.

Kevin Rocheleau is a Junior majoring in Physics and Applied Mathematics. The Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Michigan Tech has recently spotlighted his interest in arts in their blog site, VPA Student Spotlight: Kevin Rocheleau. Kevin is involved with several music ensembles.