Research Excellence Fund Awards Announced
The vice president for research is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Research Excellence Fund Award. Associate Professor of Physics Will Cantrell received an Infrastructure Enhancement Grant.
Read more at Tech Today.
Michigan Tech faculty, staff members, and students received awards tallying $ 96,635 in funding through the Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC), sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Physics graduate student Colin Gurganus received a $5,000 fellowship for his project entitled “Examining the Role of Surface Roughness on Atmospheric Nucleation Processes.”
Read more at Tech Today.
PI Raymond Shaw and Co-PI Jiang Lu (Physics) have received $124,554 for the first year of a three-year $380,011 research grant, “Investigating the Effect of Solar Activity During a Grand Minimum on Clouds” from NASA.
From Tech Today.
Adj. Assistant Professor Siegfried Hoefinger (Physics) and Professor and Chair of Department Ravindra Pandev (Physics), “An Innovative Model for Large-Scale Simulation of Membrane Proteins,” NIH.
From Tech Today.
The best graduate student talks and posters 2013 have been found by popular vote. As in previous years we had two clear favorites in each of the two categories. And the winners are:
Renee Batzloff – Paleomagnetism of the Baraga-Marquette Dyke Swarms
Li Jie – Implementation of a Hot-Deformation Process for Making Nd2Fe14B-based Permanent Magnetic Materials
Marwa Abdalamoneam – Atomic Moments and Polarizabilities of Ni II
Hugo Albert Ayala Sorlares – Studying Galactic Diffuse Gamma-Ray Emission with the HAWC Observatory in Mexico
The Physics Department Poster Session was held on April 18, 2013, in the Fisher Atrium. The physics graduate students were held throughout the latter part of Spring Semester 2013.
Congratulations to the four winners and everyone else on their presentations!
View the 2013 Physics Department Poster Session photo gallery.
Miguel Levy (Physics) has coauthored the book “Magnetophotonics: From Theory to Applications” (Springer Series in Materials Science) with Mitsuteru Inoue and Alexander V. Baryshev.
From Tech Today.
Two Physics majors, Darcy Jacobson and Michael Adler, will be accepting summer internships with the German Academic Exchange Service this summer. The program is called RISE, or Research Internships in Science and Engineering. The internship is offered through DAAD, or Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, the German Academic Exchange Service.
Darcy Jacobson will be working at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. Darcy will be collaborating with PhD student Martin Rohloff on a project entitled “Size Distribution of Rain Droplets,” measuring droplet size distributions and velocity fields for various temperature ramps, compositions and stirring rates. The research group, coordinated by Jürgen Vollmer, is working on a wide range of topics in non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Michael Adler will be collaborating with Konrad Makowka on “Numerical Simulation of Supersonic Combustion including Turbulence Chemistry Interaction with Large Eddy Simulation.” The application is for scramjets, which are hypersonic airbreathing engines that may offer more efficient travel to space than classical rocket engines. This work will take place at the TU München, or Technical University of Munich, preceded by a two week language immersion program in Berlin.
In mid July members of the RISE program will meet in Heidelberg for a conference.
BBC News has reported on the image captured by the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory or Hawc. This facility now holds the record for the highest-energy light captured. The image shows the shadow cast by the Moon as it blocks light and particles.
Hawc is currently composed of 30 detectors located in a national park near the Mexican city of Puebla.
Assistant professor of physics Petra Huentemeyer, whose background is in astrophysics and elementary particle physics, is involved with the Hawc Observatory.
Read more at BBC News Science & Environment, by Jason Palmer.
Associate Professor Will Cantrell (Physics) and student Joseph Niehaus (Physics), “Mineral Dust and Biomass Burning Aerosol as a Source of Contact Ice Nuclei in Arctic Mixed Phase Clouds: Constraints from Laboratory Studies,” NASA.
Assistant Professor Claudio Mazzoleni (Physics) and graduate student Kendra Wright (Physics), “Radiative Properties of Free Tropospheric Aerosols in the North Atlantic at the Pico Mountain Observatory,” NASA.
From Tech Today.
The Graduate School is pleased to announce that Evan Anderson is Michigan Tech’s nominee for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools Distinguished Thesis Award.
Three other graduate students were also nominated for consideration. Jean DeClerck was nominated by her advisors, Ann Brady and Wendy Anderson (HU) and committee member Victoria Bergvall (HU). Nathan Kelley-Hoskins was nominated by his advisor, Petra Hüntemeyer (Physics). Andrew Orthober was nominated by his advisor, Carol MacLennan (SS). All of the nominations were noteworthy for their scholarship, and the evaluation panel had a difficult task in selecting one nominee to represent Michigan Tech.
Read more at Tech Today, by the Graduate School.