Physics Newsblog

Engineering Physics graduate student Subhasish Mandal is a recipient of a Finishing Fellowship from the Michigan Tech Graduate School. The fellowships provide support to PhD candidates who are close to completing their degrees; they are available through the generosity of alumni and friends of the University.

Congratulations to physics graduate student Matt Beals on receiving a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. This prestigious award recognizes Beal’s achievements as well as the research performed using the HOLODEC detector. His proposal was entitled “Improved Mixed Phase Cloud Microstructure Measurements: The Holographic Detector for Clouds II (HOLODEC II).” The proposal basically outlined further characterization of the instrument and analysis of data from the flights the research team was involved with last fall at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Matt Beals is part of the Cloud Physics Laboratory, coordinated by Dr. Raymond Shaw.

“Office hours” are an elastic concept for Michigan Tech’s 2012 Distinguished Teaching Award winners. “His office is always open,” says physics department chair Ravi Pandey of Will Cantrell, associate professor of physics, who received the award in the professor/associate professor category. “I’ve seen him here on Saturday and Sunday working with students.” Cantrell came to Michigan Tech in 2001, after serving as a postdoc in chemistry at Indiana University and completing his PhD at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Pandey called Cantrell “a superlative model of the scholar-teacher.” READ MORE

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce the best oral and poster presentations by physics graduate students during the Physics Colloquium poster session held on April 19, 2012, in the Aftermath Atrium in Fisher Hall. There were two similarly rated best oral presentations: “Conduction Amongst Mesoscopic Particles” by Douglas Banyai and “Calibrating a Gamma-Ray Observatory” by Nathan Kelley-Hoskins. There were also two similarly rated best poster presentations: “Individual Particle Analysis of Carbonaceous Aerosols Emitted from the Las Conchas Wildfire, Los Alamos, NM” by Swarup China and “Exploring Cloud Microstructure with the HOLODEC I” by Matthew Beals. The presentations were evaluated by the physics graduate students and ranked in order of preference. The winners will receive a small monetary award.

The University is recognizing two faculty members with the 2012 Research Award, Robert Nemiroff and Andrew Storer. In nominating Nemiroff, physics professor Don Beck and Ravindra Pandey, chair of the physics department, cited his research based on gravitational lensing, noting that his groundbreaking predictions regarding binary stars, quasars and microlensing events (which give insight into stellar distributions and dark matter) have been proved correct. In another project, Nemiroff and his graduate students searched gamma-ray bursts to find “echoes” caused by the gravitational lens effect of dark matter. READ MORE