A team of University of Wisconsin—Madison engineering students won 3rd place overall in a worldwide competition to design a pod for shuttling people on a futuristic high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop. The team will build its test pod in a workspace in Chamberlin Hall. Professor Duncan Carlsmith awarded BadgerLoop a mini grant from the Garage Physics makerspace to develop and prototype the pod system.
News Archives
Danny Crow Wins Teaching Assistant Award
Danny Crow, Ph.D. candidate in condensed matter theory, has been awarded a 2015 L&S Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Award!
Once More, Into the Breach
In 1986 and 1988 Henry (Heinz) Barschall, a respected nuclear physicist at the University of Wisconsin, editor of Physical Review C and what was then the APS Publications Oversight Committee, wrote articles in Physics Today that presented the results of a study of the cost of library subscriptions to physics journals. The consequences of Barschall’s studies provide a cautionary tale on what can go wrong when scientific and commercial interests collide.
Prof. Peter Timbie wins Faculty Development Grant
Prof. Peter Timbie will work on new materials for Physics 103-104 in conjunction with the REACH program during Fall 2016.
Prof. Duncan Carlsmith wins Kemper K. Knapp Bequest for Garage Physics
Professor Duncan Carlsmith has been awarded a $6000 from the Kemper K. Knapp Bequest for Garage Physics. The Knapp Bequest favors projects that cross departmental lines and have an impact on the educational and cultural life of the university community, particularly projects that benefit undergraduate students.
Holiday Colloquium
Cosmic Radio Bursts Yield First Clues About Their Origins
With the help of the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, a team of researchers that includes University of Wisconsin-Madison physicists has produced the first detailed portrait of a Fast Radio Burst – a brief but highly energetic pulse of radio waves from unknown sources in the distant universe.
-Terry Devitt, (608) 262-8282, trdevitt@wisc.edu
CONTACT: Peter Timbie, (608) 890-2002, pttimbie@wisc.edu
UW Selected to Host 2017 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics
The University of Wisconsin – Madison has been selected to be a host site for the 2017 Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP). Other 2017 host sites are:
- Rice University
- University of Colorado, Boulder
- Montana State University
- Virginia Tech
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- UCLA
- Wayne State University
AAAS honors Mark Eriksson and Gary Shiu
UW Physics professors Gary Shiu and Mark Eriksson have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Mark Eriksson was elected “for innovative and important contributions to the understanding and development of nanodevices for spintronics and quantum information processing applications.”
Gary Shiu was elected “for pioneering contributions to string phenomenology and cosmology, for leadership in connecting fundamental theory to experiment, and for promoting basic science in the U.S. and Asia.”
UW Alum Dr. Angela Laird (Ph.D. 2002) named APS Woman Physicist of the Month
UW alum Angela Laird was named Woman Physicist of the Month for November, 2015 by the American Physical Society. Dr. Angela Laird is an Associate Professor of Physics at Florida International University and the director of FIU’s Neuroinformatics and Brain Connectivity Laboratory. She was recently identified on the Thompson Reuters’ list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2014,” and she ranks among the top 1 percent most cited for the field of neuroscience and behavior between 2002 and 2012. Laird received her Ph.D. in Physics/Medical Physics from the UW in 2002.
Other UW Physics people who have been recognized include
January 2015 – Marjorie Corcoran (Post Doc 1977-79)
June 2013 – Reina Maruyama (former faculty)
February 2013 – Laura Reina (Scientist 97-98)
December 2012 – Jodi Cooley (UW Ph.D. 2003)