Dr. Brenna Mocker will join our department as an assistant professor this summer. Dr. Mockler grew up in Davis, and earned her B.A. in physics at Cornell and her Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Her research area is astrophysics. Using a combination of theory and observations, her work emphasizes high-energy transient astronomy. In particular, she studies tidal disruption events, when stars orbit close to a supermassive black hole and gravity from the black hole destroys the star, generating a dramatic but temporary increase in brightness. These tidal disruption events provide one of the best ways to measure the properties of black holes in the universe. Dr. Mockler will be on leave for one year to complete her CTAC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, joining us in person in summer 2026
Dr. Tessa Cookmeyer accepted an offer of an Assistant Professor position in Physics and Astronomy. The position will start in 2026, after she finishes her President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Cookmeyer, a condensed matter theorist, did her undergraduate work at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, followed by a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley working with Professor Joel Moore. She studied several types of quantum materials, from spin liquids to so-called "strange metals," using both numerical and analytical techniques. In these materials interactions among large numbers of electrons give rise to a range of counterintuitive behaviors, some of which may lead to practical applications. Dr. Cookmeyer actively searches for connections to real systems and collaborated closely with experimentalists during both her graduate and postdoctoral work. Given the breadth of her interests, we're excited to see what she chooses to study next.
