News » Archives » April 2012

Each year the Department of Physics recognizes undergraduate students with a variety of awards. This year’s winners are Julie Cass, Thomas Catanach, Michelle Consiglio, and Nancy Paul.

Julie Cass has been selected to receive the Outstanding Physics Major Award. This award is given to a physics graduate selected by a number of criteria including academic performance, contributions to the major, and potential for future success. It is the highest honor the Department of Physics can award to one of its graduates.…

Graduating physics major Nancy Paul was selected to present at the Final Colloquium of the Glynn Family Honors Program on Thursday, April 26. Her talk was titled Nuclear Masses, Neff and Nucleosynthesis. She is advised by Prof. Ani Aprahamian.

The Glynn Family Honors Program at the University of Notre Dame brings talented undergraduates into sustained and life-changing contact with distinguished scholars who inspire and prepare them for premier graduate and doctoral programs, for successful careers, and for lives of service.…

The Kaneb Center Graduate Student Program is pleased to announce the annual awards for outstanding graduate student teachers and teaching assistants. This program recognizes graduate students who have demonstrated excellence in the classroom, laboratory, or in another significant instructional capacity.…

The recently-organized Graduate Physics Students (GPS) group held its first Spring Conference on April 19 in Nieuwland Hall. The meeting included eight oral presentations – two each from astrophysics, condensed matter physics, high energy physics, and nuclear physics – and two poster sessions.…

Metastable phases of matter are well-known, with famous examples including supercooling and superheating of liquids and diamond which is one of the many allotropes of carbon. Metastability is almost exclusively observed in connection with first-order transitions, and is often found in frustrated systems where the energy difference between the states is small.…

Senior Nancy Paul has been selected to receive a 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship. Paul, who is also a member of the Glynn Family Honors Program for the Arts and Sciences, will earn her Bachelor of Science in Physics with a concentration in Advanced Physics in May. She has taken advantage of numerous research opportunities throughout her undergraduate career and currently serves at the Editor-in-Chief of Scientia…

The Department of Physics at the University of Notre Dame inducted 10 undergraduate physics majors and 4 physics professors into Sigma Pi Sigma on Friday, April 13. Professor Peter Garnavich, faculty advisor of the Society of Physics Students, and Professor Mitchell Wayne, Department Chair, presented the inductees with their honor cords.…

The Graduate Physics Students (GPS) will be hosting the Spring Conference 2012 on Thursday, April 19. The conference will showcase the research being done in the Department of Physics by the graduate students. There will be eight speakers and two poster sessions. Events will take place in Nieuwland Science Hall. A conference social will conclude the day's events.…

Physics graudate student Mayukh Gangopadhyay has been invited to the Mathematical Science Research Institute (MSRI) summer graduate school, Mathematical General Relativity. The event will take place in July at MSRI in Berkley, California.

Gangopadhyay's invitation to the summer school is noteworthy. It is highly competitive, and priority is given to graduate students in mathematics.…

Chad Meyer, a graduate student in the Department of Physics, has received the 2012 Center for Research Computing Award for Computational Sciences and Visualization.

This award recognizes outstanding contributions in the areas of computational sciences and visualization. Such contributions may include, but are not limited to: 1) applications of high performance computation and/or visualization technology; 2) development of algorithms, codes, software environments or other tools for better using high performance computing and/or visualization.…