UC Davis physics adjunct professor Kai Liu was elected to the rank of NAI Fellow, citing his demonstrated “highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.” Professor Liu, currently with Georgetown University, was professor of physics at UC Davis from 2001 to 2019.
Physics professor Robin Erbacher is one of seven UC Davis faculty members recognized among the top female scientists around the globe, as assessed by Research.com in its first ranking of the "Best Female Scientists in the World"
Zhen Pan, the Zel'dovich Fellow at the Perimeter Institute and former PhD student advised by Professor Lloyd Knox, will be joining the faculty of the T. D. Lee Institute, a new institute in Shanghai, China affiliated with Shanghai Jiaotong University. Although Dr. Pan's appointment does not start until the coming summer, he has already secured a research grant and is looking to hire two postdoctoral scholars.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Davis will be hosting a 2-hour online open house to introduce prospective graduate students to our PhD program. Students will be able to meet with faculty and current graduate students to learn about our graduate program, research, and life at UC Davis.
Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy John Rundle has been tapped to be a Keynote speaker at the upcoming Natural Disasters Exposition in Anaheim, CA, in recognition of his high visibility in the area of earthquake forecasting. His talk will be titled: “Anticipating Earthquakes"
Join us for a screening of the film "Secrets of the Universe" at the Mondavi Center on October 26. Through the film, you will embark on a journey into one of the most amazing scientific instruments ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. Filmed at CERN, this 45 minute film follows UC Davis professor Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez and his graduate students as they use the world's largest particle collider to recreate conditions a microsecond after the Big Bang and reveal clues about the strongest force of the universe. The film explores how the questions explored at the collider are connected to the larger questions we have been asking in Science through the centuries. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with professor Calderón de la Barca and the students featured in the film. The event will be free. More details to follow.
Prof. David Wittman was awarded 8 orbits of Hubble Space Telescope time to study collisions of galaxy clusters. These are the largest masses in the universe and a large fraction of their mass is dark matter. Hence, merging clusters can be thought of as "large dark matter colliders" probing the properties of dark matter in ways that Earthbound colliders cannot.
James Crutchfield, a physics professor and director of the Complexity Sciences Center at UC Davis and graduate student Kyle Ray have a cooler proposal, and it involves a fundamental shift in how computers handle information. A paper about the work is currently available as a preprint and was featured on the cover of the July issue of Scientific American.
