News

Mark Trodden elected Fellow of IOP

Mark Trodden has been elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.  The senior class of membership indicates a very high level of achievement in physics and an outstanding contribution to the profession.  The Institute of Physics is a leading international professional body and learned society, established to promote the advancement and dissemination of physics.

Alison Sweeney wins Bartholomew Award

Asst. Prof. Alison Sweeney has been selected as this year's winner of the Bartholomew Award. This award is given each year to the top young physical biologist by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.  She will give the keynote address at the meeting of the Society in January 2013.  More information on the award itself is available here.

First light for Dark Energy Survey

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly-constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.  A contingent of faculty, staff and students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences is playing a major role in the Dark Energy Science collaboration.

Charlie Kane awarded Dirac Medal

Prof. Charlie Kane is a winner of this year's Dirac Medal and Prize, one of the top prizes in theoretical physics internationally.

The citation is as follows:

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Emeritus Professor of Physics Fay Ajzenberg-Selove passed away on August 8. Fay became the second female tenured professor in the School of Arts and Sciences in 1973 and remained at Penn until her retirement in 2003.Before coming to Penn she was the first full-time female faculty member at Haverford College. Her principal scholarly work was in the preparation of evaluated reviews and summaries of studies on nuclei with mass numbers 5 to 20. The influence of her publications and her remarkable personal journey in science led to her receiving the National Medal of Science in 2007.

Charlie Kane Named a Simons Investigator

Charlie Kane has been honored by being named a Simons Investigator in the inaugural year of the program by the Simons Foundation. The award, which starts on August 1, is accompanied by $660,000 in funding over a five-year period.

2012 Glenn Brown Dissertation Prize

Sabetta Matsumoto (formerly with the Kamien group) wins 2012 Glenn Brown Dissertation Prize of the International Liquid Crystal Society for highly creative application of analytical mathematics combined with deep geometric insight to an especially interesting variety of problems in liquid crystal physics. She will receive the award in August in Mainz, Germany. 

Explaining the Higgs Boson

In a Philadelphia Daily News Q&A, Penn physicist Gino Segre explains the Higgs boson. Penn has been deeply involved in the search for the elusive particle.

At 1pm on Tuesday, July 17, Prof. Segre will conduct a live chat on philly.com.

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New Boson Discovered at CERN

By combining the work of two research teams, ATLAS and CMS, CERN has announced the discovery of a new boson with a mass between 125-126 GeV/c2 at a confidence level that leaves the chance of random events faking the discovery at less than 1 in 10 million.