News

Evolution Cluster in the news

Answering President Amy Gutmann’s call “to address the most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach,”Penn’s new Evolution Cluster—officially titled the Evolution of Dynamical Processes Far from Equilibrium Cluster and led by Physics Prof. Randy Kamien—presents an innovative model for organizing research, teaching, and learning in ways that will have broad implications across the University.

SAS Working Group grant for Math and Physics

Prof. Antonella Grassi of Math and Prof. Mirjam Cvetic of Physics & Astronomy have received a School of Arts and Sciences Working Group grant to support interdisciplinary research.  The Math and Physics departments have an extensive history of collaboration that spans the boundaries of mathematics and theoretical physics.

Masters of Medical Physics Program

The Penn Masters of Medical Physics Program (MMP) is profiled in an article in this month's SAS Frontiers magazine.  Adjunct Associate Professor Stephen Avery describes the program as "These approaches are all from basic physics; it's just that we're applying it to medicine.  We want someone who is going to be innovative, really be a leader.  We want our students to push the field forward."

Penn student wins NSF Graduate Fellowship

Jason Rocks has just received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).  The oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers.

Astronomy Night at Penn

On April 7, members of the Penn Department of Physics and Astronomy will host the general public in exploring the night sky through telescopes on Penn's Shoemaker Green.  Special physics demonstrations and a lecture about supernovae and dark energy by Asst. Prof. James Aguirre are also on the agenda.  

Penn particle cosmologists win NASA grant

Prof. Mark Trodden and Assoc. Prof. Justin Khoury have obtained a NASA grant, joint with Cornell University, focussing on the prospect of connecting gravitational predictions of proposed theories of dark matter and cosmic acceleration to experimental tests of gravity and the equivalence principle from table-top searches to measurements in the solar system and binary pulsar observations.

Penn Graduate Students in Particle Physics receive Prestigious Fellowships

Congratulations to three Penn Graduate students who have recently been awarded some of
the most prestigious fellowships in particle physics! Richard Bonventre,
who works on the SNO+ experiment, was awarded an Owen Chamberlain
Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, James Saxon,  who
works on the ATLAS experiment, was awarded an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship, and Douglas Schaefer , who also works on the ATLAS
experiment received a CERN Fellowship. These awards, in addition to

Penn scientists on NPR

Profs. Mark Devlin and Mark Trodden were guests on WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane broadcast.  They discussed a recent discovery about the inflationary period of the early universe.  Audio of the broadcast is here.

P&A grad students win DCF fellowships

Carl Goodrich and Marius Lungu, graduate students in the Physics & Astronomy department, have been awarded Dissertation Completion Fellowships from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  DCF awards are made on the basis of academic excellence as evaluated by the SAS Committee on Graduate Education and support students in the final year of their graduate career. 

Mirjam Cvetic elected to European Academy

Prof. Mirjam Cvetič has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for her scientific contributions to high energy theoretical physics, in particular in the field of string theory compatification and black hole physics.