From left to right: Andrea Lappi, John Jaszczak, Ranjit Pati, Don Beck, Bob Weidman, Wil Slough, Ramy El-Ganainy, Brian Fick, Claudio Mazzoleni, Bryan Suits, Miguel Levy, Alex Kostinski, Debbie Linn, Kimberly Oldt, Ravi Pandey, Will Cantrell, Yoke Khin Yap, Ray Shaw, Petra Huentemeyer, Bob Nemiroff, Jacek Borysow, and Max Seel.
Find all of the faculty and staff of the Department of Physics.
Yoke Khin Yap (Physics) was awarded by Osaka University in Japan with the title of Global Alumni Fellow. The newly established award is granted to alumni who are academically active overseas. Yap is among the first few honorees joining alumni from Purdue, Pennsylvania, Columbia, The National Institute of Health, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Cambridge and others.
Yap has been an active alumni of Osaka University. He is one of the founding members and board of directors of the Osaka University North American Alumni Association (OU-NAAA) created in January 2006. OU-NAAA helps alumni in North America connect with the university, students and faculty through social and academic networking activities.
Yoke Khin Yap and collaborators’ article, “Switching Behaviors of Graphene-Boron Nitride Nanotube Heterojunctions” was published on Nature Scientific Reports.
The work of Yap and collaborators has also been highlighted in Nanowerk, Scicasts, Electronics Weekly, EE Times, IEEE Spectrum, KurzweilAl, Sciencedaily, phys.org, EurekAlert and numerous others.
The Almetric system (social attention of a scholarly article) ranks Yap’s paper in the 97th percentile of all tracked articles of a similar age in all journals.
John A. Jaszczak (Physics) was invited to write a Viewpoint about a new paper published in Physical Review Letters about important experimental work on the growth of quasicrystals. His article, “Viewpoint: Watching Quasicrystals Grow,” discusses exciting new work that images–at the atomic scale–the growth of an alloy that exhibits crytsallographically forbidden symmetry, but whose structure can be modeled using the famous, non-periodic Penrose tilings. Viewpoints are editor-invited commentaries written by experts in their field about research articles published in American Physical Society journals, and appear in the online-only news site Physics.
Two Faculty Members to Perform in Concert
New Chamber Music at the Calumet Art Center
The Calumet Art Center hosts the fifth year of New Chamber Music at 7:30 p.m. tonight featuring two Michigan Tech faculty. Composer and violinist Paul Seitz, assisted by soprano Christine Seitz, composer and violinist Sylvia del Real, violinist/violist Erica Flyte, cellist Pat Quimby (MSE), pianist Jon Ensminger and flautist Bryan Suits (Physics) will perform recently-composed works by participating composers as well as earlier compositions by Bela Bartok, George Gershwin and Henry Purcell that have features in common with the new works. There is an $8.00 suggested donation.
The Calumet Art Center is located on 57055 Fifth Street in Calumet. Call 906-934-2228 or visit CalumetArtCenter.com for more information.
The Keweenaw Science and Engineering Festival (KSEF) is a four day event that brings learning and fun together for the whole family.
During Nerd Night, teenagers gathered at the Continental Fire Company in Houghton for hands-on activities hosted by Michigan Tech’s Physics Department.
MTU Laboratory Systems Associate Scott Rutterbush says that learning about science now will give these students a leg up in the future.
Read more and listen to audio clips at The Keweenaw Report.
The Keweenaw Report is sharing a video on Facebook which includes an interview with lab associate Scott Rutterbush.
The KSEF Facebook page is sharing another Nerd Night video.
Kids have fun, also learn at Nerd Night
HOUGHTON – From static electricity to inertia, area fifth- through 12th-graders got to see scientific principles brought to life through demonstrations at Nerd Night Wednesday.
Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Garrett Neese (subscription required).
Nerds are the new cool kids in the U.P.
Laboratory Systems Associate in MTU’s Physics Department Scott Rutterbush said, “The more we can expose these kids to that, the more base level of understanding they’ll have and the more we, at places like Michigan Tech, can do with them when they come into our program. It’s making them better engineers, making them better scientists.”
Read more and watch the video at ABC 10 News, by Rick Allen.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), one of the most innovative and respected astronomy science education organizations in the U.S., is proud to announce the recipients of its 2015 awards for excellence in astronomy research and education.
The awards will be formally presented at an ASP Awards Ceremony and Banquet on October 10, 2015 at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA as part of ASP’s Annual Meeting and Public Festival (Universe 2015).
The Klumpke-Roberts Award for outstanding contributions to public understanding and appreciation of astronomy is awarded to Dr. Robert Nemiroff (left) and Dr. Jerry Bonnell (right) for their work on the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Dr. Robert Nemiroff is a Professor in the Physics department at Michigan Technological University. He is an active researcher, teaches undergraduate and graduate physics courses, and supervises graduate students. Dr. Jerry Bonnell is a research scientist with the University of Maryland Astronomy Department on contract to the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. They are the co-creators and co-editors of Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Since 1995, they have selected and explained one image of our universe every day. Their explanations include links to additional information, deepening the educational value of the site. Each day’s image and explanation are archived, forming what is one of the largest annotated archives of diverse astronomy images on the web. APOD’s home site is hosted by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and currently gets an average of 1 million hits per day. Its three major social media sites collectively have over 2 million followers. APOD is translated into 21 languages, including Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, and Chinese, and has mirror sites in at least 23 countries.
Mike Meyer gave the keynote address on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, for the Student Technology Conference held in Houghton this week. The conference concerns content-rich academic, computing, and telecommunications technologies in student living areas. The keynote address was entitled “The Transition to Teaching 24:7.”
Meyer is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning on campus.
The conference is a ResNet activity. ResNet is an international organization providing a forum for discussion, collaboration, and development for IT professionals in higher education. The conference runs June 16-19, 2015.
Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) was launched this day in 1995. The massively followed online site is maintained by APOD co-founders Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell.
The 20th anniversary APOD image is a digital re-pixelation of a Vermeer using over 5,000 APOD images that have been featured on the site.
Nemiroff and Bonnell were interviewed by The Verge.
APOD launched on June 16, 1995. In advance of its milestone birthday, I spoke on the phone with the two guys who have run the site by hand for two decades, a seemingly unfathomable task in the age of ephemeral content. How do they do it? A combination of Microsoft Word, a fiery passion for astrophotography, and lots and lots of emails.
So where did the idea originally come from?
Robert Nemiroff: Jerry Bonnell and I shared an office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and we were both — we’re still — active researchers. But the web was growing up, and so we brainstormed to try to figure out how we could contribute to this web. One idea, we thought, was maybe we can make lots of money, and buy a Hawaiian island or something. But that never worked out. [Laughs.]
Michigan Tech and the surrounding community are joining together to host the inaugural Keweenaw Science and Engineering Festival to stimulate and sustain interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in the Keweenaw for all ages. This four-day festival is an open forum to showcase all facets of STEM in the Western Upper Peninsula. Current scheduled events have something for all ages and include the Michigan Tech Mind Trekkers, Nerd Night for teens with Tech’s Physics Department, the Family Engineering Day, Summer Concert Series, Science Pub Crawl, The Wonders of Physics, science comedian Brian Malow and David Gaynes presenting his documentary Saving Hubble and more! This event is scheduled for August 5 to 8, and most of the activities are free.
See the event calendar on the current schedule. Volunteers are still needed to help with the festival. If you would like to get involved and run a hands-on demonstration, assist with set-up, work the KSEF booth or have questions on how to volunteer contact Amanda McConnon at amcconno@mtu.edu.
From Tech Today, by Center for Pre-College Outreach.
Sun, sand, science
Festival intended to spark STEM interest
Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Meghan Marquardt (subscription required).