Michelle Girvan, Wolfgang Losert, Johnpierre Paglione, Edo Waks and Jake Taylor have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.

Prof. Girvan was cited for seminal contributions to the nonlinear and statistical physics of complex networks, including characterization of network structures and dynamics, and interdisciplinary applications.

She received her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, and joined the Department of Physics in 2007, after a postdoctoral appointment at the Santa Fe Institute. Prof. Girvan was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2008-09, and in 2017 received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship in the Department of Physics. She is a member of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and the Director of the COMBINE (Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks) program.

Prof. Losert was cited for his imaginative studies of complex living systems, and for numerous contributions to understanding dynamical properties of complex systems at the convergence of physics, materials science, and biology.

Prof. Losert holds a Ph.D. in physics from the City College of the City University of New York, and joined UMD in 2000 after appointments at Haverford College. He has served as director of the UMD Biophysics graduate program and is currently the director of the UMD-NCI Partnership for Cancer Technology and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Graduate Education and Research in the College of Mathematical and Natural Sciences. In 2006, he received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship.

Prof. Paglione was cited for experimental contributions to the understanding of strongly correlated and topological electronic materials through the synthesis and investigation of heavy fermion compounds, unconventional superconductors and topological materials.

Prof. Paglione, who received his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from the University of Toronto, joined UMD in 2008. He is the recipient of a National Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, a Materials Synthesis Investigator Award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a DOE Early Career Award, the 2012 Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF Career Award. He is currently the director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and is an Associate Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Quantum Materials program. 

Prof. Waks was cited for significantly advancing the field of quantum photonics and for developing new concepts to strongly interact solid-state quantum emitters with nanophotonic components.

He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and after a postdoctoral appointment there, joined the UMD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008. He accepted a joint appointment with the Department of Physics in 2017. Prof. Waks researches nanoscale photonic and semiconductor devices for applications in quantum computation, communication, and sensing. He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and of the Optical Society of America and is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award and an NSF Career Award.

Dr. Taylor was cited for wide ranging contributions in using quantum properties of light and matter towards developing applications ranging from extreme sensitivity sensors and transducers to quantum information processing. 

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Pappalardo Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Joint Quantum Institute in 2009. He has received a Presidential Early Career Award, a Department of Commerce Silver Medal, a NIST Sigma Xi Young Scientist Award and a C15 Young Scientist Award from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Dr. Taylor is the NIST Co-Director for the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science. 

In addition. Dr. Surjalal Sharma from the Department of Astronomy was cited for pioneering and sustained contributions to nonlinear dynamical modeling of non-equilibrium phenomena in space physics and to the development of data-enabled science and for his leadership in fostering international collaborations.

Alumnus Ravi Kuchimanchi (Ph.D., 1995) has been awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize of the American Physical Society "for his continued research in physics while simultaneously advocating for global policies that reflect science; for leading sustainable development, human rights, and social justice efforts; and for creating a vibrant international volunteer movement that learns from, works with, and empowers communities in India."

The Sakharov Prize, established to recognize outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights, is named for the Russian nuclear physicist-turned-activist who won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of freedom, disarmament and human rights.

Dr. Kuchimanchi founded Association for India’s Development (AID) while a UMD graduate student. In 2012, he was named the International Alumnus of the Year by the College of Computer, Mathmatical and Natural Sciences. His life was dramatized in the move Swades.

On October 24, 2017, two Fellows of the Joint Quantum Institute and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science were among those that testified during a joint congressional committee hearing on the topic of American Leadership in Quantum Technology.

Carl Williams and Christopher Monroe attended as expert panelists, reading prepared statements and answering questions from committee members. Williams, who is also the deputy director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), provided testimony about quantum research at NIST. Monroe—a Distinguished University Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD) and a co-founder and chief scientist at UMD-based startup IonQ, Inc—advocated for a National Quantum Initiative in his testimony. Both shared their perspectives on the path toward industry’s adoption of this emerging new technology.

The hearing focused on the status of quantum research in the US. Two panels with a total of six experts from government, industry, academia, and national laboratories testified. The witnesses emphasized that quantum information science will play a critical role in future advanced computing and secure communications. They also noted potential applications related to chemistry, medicine, artificial intelligence, and even space exploration.

In answering questions about the maturity of quantum information research, participants cited both Monroe’s and IBM’s small-scale quantum devices. According to panelists, commercialization of quantum technology is an imminent reality, rather than a futuristic goal. Participants discussed the global impact that industrial quantum science will have, noting that governments worldwide are investing in large-scale quantum research. China, Australia and Europe, in particular, are beginning to pour massive resources into funding quantum research.

Quantum at Maryland

UMD’s flagship College Park campus is home to a thriving quantum enterprise that is actively producing a competitive workforce, delivering innovative research, and attracting a network of strategic partners. With more than 175 scientists on-site and countless collaborations within a vast global research network, quantum programs at Maryland are leading the charge toward a quantum future.

• The Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), founded in 2006, is a physics research partnership with NIST and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences dedicated to intensely studying quantum science.

• A quantum-focused NSF Physics Frontier Center was first awarded to UMD in 2008 and renewed in 2014. This is a prestigious designation that promotes collaborative exploration of challenging but highly promising research areas.

• The Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), launched in 2014, is a UMD-NIST initiative that expands research at the interface of quantum computer science and quantum physics. This innovative center seeks to understand and enable the full promise of quantum computation.

• UMD enjoys vital relationships with industrial and government-laboratory efforts in quantum computing, such as Microsoft, Northrop-Grumman, Sandia National Laboratories, the Army Research Laboratory, Booz-Allen-Hamilton, and the startup IonQ, Inc. Many UMD graduates have taken positions at these places. 

MEDIA CONTACT

E. Edwards | eedwards@umd.edu | (301) 405-2291

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Two landmark achievements of 20th century physics remain stubbornly isolated, despite decades of attempts by scientists to bring them together.

On their own, they’ve been wildly successful. General relativity—Einstein’s grand theory of gravity—fused space and time into a single entity. It birthed the global positioning system and forever changed our conception of the cosmos. Quantum physics, the theory that governs the microscopic realm, powered the engines of the digital revolution, and it’s lighting the way to a new paradigm in computing.

But the two fields have largely been marooned on parallel tracks, rarely intersecting because they seem to describe such disparate domains of reality. “When electricity flows through a circuit, gravity is there,” says Brian Swingle, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland and the newest fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS). “We just don’t usually need it to describe the physics, so we ignore it.”

That might be fine for the physics of electrical circuits, Swingle says, but scientists expect a unified picture to emerge for the highest-energy, densest material in the universe—a picture in which quantum physics and gravity contribute on equal footing. Swingle, who arrived at UMD this past summer, is part of a vanguard of physicists exploring the connections between these two fields. His work blends quantum information and condensed matter physics with a pinch of gravity, and it’s unearthing curious connections between some of the most eye-catching phenomena that modern physics has on offer—things like quantum entanglement and black holes.

He hopes to expand on this work at Maryland and foster more collaboration between experts in all of these fields. “I think UMD has a lot of great resources, and there’s an opportunity now for new connections to be forged,” Swingle says. “That’s definitely one of the things that really excites me.”

Swingle’s interest in physics was kindled as a teenager, when a set of mysterious symbols captured his imagination. “Senior year of high school I somehow got interested in Maxwell’s equations,” he says, recounting his first contact with the four equations that are the distillation all of the 19th century’s knowledge about electricity and magnetism. “There was this mysterious picture with upside down triangles, which looked like gobbledygook, and it seemed really interesting to me. I’ve sort of been hooked ever since.”

He pursued a physics degree as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he got an early start in research, writing software to simulate the behavior of many interacting particles and spending a summer working as a research assistant at the University of Washington.

He arrived at MIT for graduate school in 2005 with a loose plan to study condensed matter physics. But some early projects didn’t work out. “I thought about switching to neuroscience,” Swingle says. “I was thinking of working on birdsong. I had a general interest in information networks and higher organization.”

But his neuroscience career also stalled, and eventually he ended up back in condensed matter physics working with Xiao-Gang Wen, a luminary in the field. Wen asked Swingle to look into a problem involving quantum entanglement, the curiously strong connection that two quantum objects can share, and something clicked. Swingle became fascinated with entanglement, calculating the entanglement properties of a variety of quantum systems. “I was looking for some kind of picture,” he says, “but I didn’t really know what it was.”

That all changed when he took a class in string theory, the theoretical effort to recast all of modern physics in the language of tiny vibrating strings. String theory made one of the earliest attempts to shoehorn gravity into quantum physics, and over the course of several decades string theorists discovered some interesting relationships between the two. One such connection was a duality between quantum physics playing out in a particular universe and a theory of gravity in a universe with one extra dimension.

Swingle explains the gist of that relationship using a round table. Imagine that the table’s edge—a circle that wraps its perimeter—is a one-dimensional universe with a bunch of interacting quantum systems. It turns out that picking a particular quantum state for this encompassing ring limits what can happen in the interior—the tabletop itself—and vice versa. The truly strange thing is that the tabletop ends up endowed with gravity, but it’s now a theory of gravity in two dimensions. “The question you can kind of ask is ‘Where does the extra dimension come from?’” Swingle says.

It’s a lot of abstract math that need not have much to do with our universe, but Swingle discovered a particular way in which this abstraction becomes real. “I started to see these connections,” Swingle says. “It was starting to gel in an interesting way.”

Tensor networks—graphical webs that can represent the complicated states of interacting quantum systems—provided the key ingredient. Drawing the tensor network of a quantum system living on the edge of a table turned out to be a picture of a theory of gravity inside, a discrete snapshot of the fabric of spacetime on the tabletop. It was a simple theory of quantum gravity, albeit one that does not describe our universe. “Quantum gravity in any spacetime is sufficiently mysterious and sufficiently poorly understood that it's worth understanding even a toy case,” Swingle says.

Since his pioneering result, Swingle has continued to develop the relationship between quantum entanglement—depicted via hierarchical webs of tensor networks—and geometry, and has recently been thinking about the role complexity and computation play in all of it. A recent paper with several collaborators demonstrated a precise mathematical connection between the complexity of a quantum state and the geometry of its dual theory of gravity. It’s part of a body of work that is continuing to shift physicists’ perspectives on quantum gravity. “The old slogan used to be that entanglement was the fabric of spacetime,” Swingle says. “Now maybe it’s more general. Maybe now we think of spacetime itself as a computational history of some process—the picture of the quantum circuit that prepares the quantum state, something like that.”

Now, as an assistant professor at UMD, Swingle hopes to continue research along these lines, perhaps bringing more quantum information tools into the fray. He is also a co-principal investigator for the “It from Qubit” collaboration launched by the Simons Foundation. The name is a play on “it from bit,” a phrase coined by physicist John Archibald Wheeler that underscored the significance of information to the bedrock upon which reality sits. “Of course, information is quantum mechanical, since the world is quantum mechanical,” Swingle says. “Somehow that’s an important ingredient in the story—the quantum-ness is really important.”

Swingle encourages any students interested in learning more about his research to contact him directly or stop by his weekly group meeting, which is typically held on Thursdays at 5 p.m. in PSC 3150.

—Story by Chris Cesare

Alumnus Charles L. Bennett (B.S. Physics and Astronomy, 1978) has received the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies.” Bennett, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, led the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission. Members of the WMAP team will share the $3 million prize for their measurements and insights into the young universe.

Prof. Bennett also received the 2017 Institute of Physics (IOP) Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, the Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the National Academy of Sciences’ Draper Medal and Comstock Prize in Physics. He was the Department of Physics Alumnus of the Year in 2003.

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) tops the charts for the 2017 Breakthrough of the Year with Physics World with the first multimessenger observation of a neutron-star merger.  UMD Professors Alessandra Buonanno and Peter Shawhan are both collaborators with LIGO and have contributed to the detection of the fourth gravitational wave. 

Professor Chris Monroe and his colleagues have also been included in the Physics World Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2017 for their research on time crystals.  The study of time crystals was first envisioned five years ago when Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek proposed the idea.  Chris Monroe has one of the leading experiments.  His group uses trapped ions to create time crystals in their lab. Physics World also recognizes Mikhail Lukin and his collaborators at Harvard University who have been simultaneously working with time crystals using diamond defects.

The DFG announced today that Professor Alessandra Buonanno will be honoured with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize for her key role in the first direct observations of gravitational waves. This long-awaited discovery is a historic scientific milestone, and was awarded this year’s Nobel prize in Physics. Alessandra Buonanno is one of the scientists who made the detection possible.

Noted physics educator John W. Layman, who held a joint appointment in Physics and the Department of Education until his retirement in 1998, died on December 30, 2017. He was 84.

Prof. Layman, an Illinois native, received an undergraduate degree from Park College in Missouri in 1955 and then taught science in Kansas City public schools. In 1961, he moved to Philadelphia to earn a master’s degree in education from Temple University. He resumed his high school teaching career in Missouri until entering Oklahoma State University, where he received his doctorate in education in 1970 and quickly accepted his appointment at UMD.

Prof. Layman used his background in education to raise the consciousness of UMD Physics faculty in the issues of teaching and learning. He introduced (and ran) training for teaching assistants and developed new lecture demonstration materials. He developed and taught a course for prospective elementary school teachers using laboratory-based and inquiry-based methods to study some of the basic ideas of the physical sciences. His impact on the educational outlook of the physics faculty was perhaps as profound as his impact on his own students.

Prof. Layman was known for his enthusiasm in the classroom, infusing classes such as the Physics of Light with highly-entertaining demonstrations and descriptions of rainbows, prisms and holograms. Along with colleagues in the UMD Physics Education Research Group, he was an early adapter and researcher of the role of computers in the realm of science teaching.

In 1982, he served as President of the American Association of Physics Teachers; a few years later, he was instrumental in persuading the organization to relocate to College Park from Stony Brook, NY. This move eventually prompted the centralization of physics societies here. He was pivotal in founding the Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC), an AAPT-American Physical Society (APS) partnership, and in developing the Powerful Ideas in Physical Science curriculum to train elementary school teachers. In 1998, the AAPT recognized his numerous contributions with the Melba Newell Phillips Award.

In the 2015 AAPT summer conference hosted at UMD, the group honored Prof. Layman with a plaque recognizing "his many years of dedication and service to AAPT as Secretary, President, Archivist, and numerous other roles."

Dr. Layman was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the APS, which cited him in 2003 “…for his contributions to physics education and for his national leadership in the training of physics teachers.” He was named a Distinguished Alumnus by his undergraduate alma mater in 2005.

Published works by Sankar Das Sarma, Ian Spielman, Jacob Taylor and Dennis vanEngelsdorp have consistently been judged by their peers to be of particular use and significance
Four faculty members in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences are included on Clarivate Analytics’ 2017 list of Highly Cited Researchers, a compilation of influential names in science.

Computer scientist Amitabh Varshney has been named dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS), effective March 1, 2018.  Varshney is a professor of computer science at UMD and director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He recently completed a one-year term as the university’s interim vice president for research.

James Baker (B.S. ’49, physics) met his wife Dorothy (B.S. ’51, physics) in his first physics laboratory course at the University of Maryland.

“I remember she was doing the Millikan oil-drop experiment,” James said. “I don’t even remember what mine was. I was so stricken with her.”

The couple, who married in 1966, provide need-based scholarships for undergraduates in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences who are preparing to be K-12 science or math teachers

Two seniors in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) have been awarded 2018 Winston Churchill Scholarships, which offer full funding to pursue one-year master’s degrees at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Maissam Barkeshli, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland and fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, has been awarded a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. Granted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this award identifies 126 early-career scientists based on their potential to contribute fundamentally significant research to a wider academic community.  

Barkeshli, a theoretical condensed matter physicist interested in complex quantum many-body phenomena, will use the fellowship to further his research into the collective behavior that emerges in systems of strongly interacting particles governed by the laws of quantum mechanics.

“I am honored to receive this prestigious fellowship,” said Barkeshli. “It represents an affirmation of my work by distinguished members of the physics community, and it encourages me to continue my efforts in understanding the complexities of quantum matter.”

Barkeshli’s research mixes physics with mathematics and draws motivation from the ongoing pursuit to build next-generation computing devices ruled by quantum physics. Beyond the applications, his research explores the many ways that atoms and electrons—prototypical quantum particles—can combine in large numbers to produce a range of novel behaviors.  

For example, interesting things seem to happen at the interface between two different quantum materials. In 2014, Barkeshli and several colleagues showed that, at least theoretically, electrons can lose their electric charge or shed a quantum property called spin when they hop between two quantum materials. With the Sloan Research Fellowship, Barkeshli hopes to continue studying the novel ways that electrons and other, more exotic particles behave at these interfaces. This research could uncover new ways of building quantum computers that are virtually immune to noise, and has led to experimental proposals that could soon be tested in the lab.

Barkeshli has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed journal articles. Before joining the UMD faculty in 2016, Barkeshli worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research’s Station Q (2013-2016) and at Stanford University (2010-2013). He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and a second bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He received his doctoral degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010.

Barkeshli joins the list of 39 current UMD College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences faculty members who have received Sloan Research Fellowships.  

The two-year $65,000 Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded to U.S. and Canadian researchers in the fields of chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics.  Candidates must be nominated by their fellow scientists and winning fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of each candidate’s independent research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in his or her field.

“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best science has to offer,” said Adam Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The brightest minds, tackling the hardest problems, and succeeding brilliantly—Fellows are quite literally the future of twenty-first century science.”

Media Relations Contact: Abby Robinson, 301-405- 5845, abbyr@umd.edu
Writers: Abby Robinson and Chris Cesare
University of Maryland
College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
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About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences

The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 9,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college’s 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary researchcenters foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $175 million.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents has selected Professor Peter Shawhan of the UMD Department of Physics for the 2018 Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship or Creative Activity. This award is the Board’s highest honor for exemplary faculty achievement.

Shawhan was cited for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2016 reported the first detection of gravitational waves. The detection of these waves—caused by the collision of two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago—verified Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and generated immense acclaim, culminating in the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish.

Just two weeks after the Nobel announcement, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the European Virgo Collaboration described another major finding: the collision of two neutron stars. A distinctive “chirp” of gravitational waves was first detected by the two LIGO interferometers, with a weaker signal recorded by the Virgo interferometer. About two seconds later, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope logged a burst of gamma rays. These nearly simultaneous signals triggered an alert to scores of observatories on Earth and in space to turn to the direction of the source and collect data over the whole electromagnetic spectrum. They gathered images and information about the neutron star collision that can be studied for years to come. This coordinated approach—multi-messenger astronomy following a gravitational-wave event—was an innovation developed and championed by Shawhan with various collaborators over many years.

Within the LSC, Shawhan is currently the Data Analysis Council Co-Chair and a member of the Executive Committee. For the initial detection of gravitational waves, the LSC and the Virgo collaboration were honored with a 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the 2016 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the 2017 Bruno Rossi Prize, and the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.

Shawhan received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, and was appointed a Millikan Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He continued at Caltech as a Senior Scientist before accepting a faculty appointment with UMD Physics in 2006. He serves as the Physics Associate Chair for Graduate Education and is a member of the UMD-Goddard Joint Space-Science Institute and its Executive Committee. In addition, he is Chair of the recently-established Division of Gravitational Physics of the American Physical Society. In August 2016, Shawhan received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the UMD Department of Physics.

The University System of Maryland Board of Regents has selected Professor Peter Shawhan of the UMD Department of Physics for the 2018 Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship or Creative Activity. This award is the Board’s highest honor for exemplary faculty achievement.

Shawhan was cited for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which in 2016 reported the first detection of gravitational waves. The detection of these waves—caused by the collision of two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago—verified Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and generated immense acclaim, culminating in the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish.

Just two weeks after the Nobel announcement, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the European Virgo Collaboration described another major finding: the collision of two neutron stars. A distinctive “chirp” of gravitational waves was first detected by the two LIGO interferometers, with a weaker signal recorded by the Virgo interferometer. About two seconds later, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope logged a burst of gamma rays. These nearly simultaneous signals triggered an alert to scores of observatories on Earth and in space to turn to the direction of the source and collect data over the whole electromagnetic spectrum. They gathered images and information about the neutron star collision that can be studied for years to come. This coordinated approach—multi-messenger astronomy following a gravitational-wave event—was an innovation developed and championed by Shawhan with various collaborators over many years.

Within the LSC, Shawhan is currently the Data Analysis Council Co-Chair and a member of the Executive Committee. For the initial detection of gravitational waves, the LSC and the Virgo collaboration were honored with a 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the 2016 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the 2017 Bruno Rossi Prize, and the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.

Shawhan received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, and was appointed a Millikan Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He continued at Caltech as a Senior Scientist before accepting a faculty appointment with UMD Physics in 2006. He serves as the Physics Associate Chair for Graduate Education and is a member of the UMD-Goddard Joint Space-Science Institute and its Executive Committee. In addition, he is Chair of the recently-established Division of Gravitational Physics of the American Physical Society. In August 2016, Shawhan received the Richard A. Ferrell Distinguished Faculty Fellowship from the UMD Department of Physics.

The American Physical Society (APS) has established a new award honoring alumnus Richard Isaacson (Ph.D., 1967). The Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science will recognize outstanding contributions in gravitational-wave physics, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and the technologies that enable this science.

The award was established with funds donated by Nobel laureates Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss to commemorate Isaacson’s impact in this field. Isaacson’s research contributed to the theory of gravitational wave generation and propagation, and he later oversaw the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) during his career as Program Director of Gravitational Physics at the National Science Foundation (NSF). With theoretical knowledge, experimental sense, patience and perseverance, he worked for years to gain support for LIGO, the largest single enterprise ever undertaken by the NSF.

On September 14, 2015, the twin LIGO observatories succeeded in detecting gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two black holes, and additional discoveries have followed. On August 17, 2017, LIGO and Virgo (a similar project in Europe) detected and localized a collision of neutron stars. A gamma-ray burst was detected two seconds later by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The source was pinpointed by optical telescopes hours later and studied intensely with many different types of instruments around the world in a historic “multi-messenger” astronomy campaign.

Isaacson obtained his doctorate under the direction of Professor Emeritus Charles Misner, and held appointments at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Illinois Institute of Technology before joining the NSF. He received the Department of Physics’ Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2014.  

The APS Division of Gravitational Physics (DGRAV) sponsored the creation of the new award. DGRAV grew from the Topical Group in Gravitation, which was established in 1995 through the efforts of Beverly K. Berger (Ph.D., 1972), another of Misner’s graduate students. UMD Physics Professor Peter Shawhan currently serves as Chair of DGRAV. 

The CMNS story, The Chirps Heard Round the World, describes the University of Maryland’s contributions to gravitational wave science. The short documentary film Mirrors That Hang on Glass Threads illuminates the scale and complexity of the LIGO detector, while LIGO Detection tells the story of the September 2015 event in the words of many LIGO scientists.

Professor Emeritus James Robert “Bob” Anderson died on March 25, 2018 after a brief hospitalization. He was 85. 

Prof. Anderson received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University and was recruited by John S. Toll to strengthen the Department’s efforts in solid state physics. He held an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the Mond Laboratory of Cambridge University before joining UMD in 1964 as an assistant professor. During his long career, his research spanned several topics in experimental condensed matter physics. He made highly-cited contributions to superconducting quantum computing since the late 1990s, and to diluted magnetic semiconductors from 1984 until the current decade. He also researched Fermi surfaces in many materials—mostly via experiment, but doing band-structure theory—from his thesis in 1962 through at least the 1980s. He enjoyed visiting appointments at the Institute for Materials Research, Sendai, Japan; Kuwait University; the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of High Pressure Physics in Moscow, among others.

He was a member of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, and maintained research connections with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. He retired from the University in 2014, but still spent much of his time in the Physics Department, and was a faithful attendee of its colloquia and seminars. He was an avid bicyclist, a devoted UMD sports enthusiast and a true fan of gentle jokes and puns.

Prof. Anderson’s memorial service has not yet been scheduled.

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Johnpierre Paglione is a Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials at the University of Maryland. His team has contributed to several fields of experimental condensed matter research through both single-crystal synthesis of superconducting, quantum-critical and topological materials, as well as exploration of novel phenomena. He is a leader in the field of quantum criticality and has made important contributions to the understanding of heavy-fermion materials and the quasiparticle picture of correlated materials.

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Four University of Maryland undergraduates have been awarded scholarships by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. In the past five years, UMD’s 20 nominations yielded 18 scholarships and two honorable mentions.

Paul Neves, Lillian Sun, Tanay Wakhare and Eric Wang were among the 211 Barry Goldwater Scholars selected from 1,280 students nominated nationally this year. Sun plans to pursue an M.D./Ph.D., while each of the other three students plans to pursue a Ph.D.

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