Faculty and Staff Highlights
Professor Chris Santangelo is the new appointed Director of Graduate Studies. We thank Professor Duncan Brown for his amazing work as the DGS over the past year.
Professor Matt Rudolph was officially granted promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure. Professor Jennifer Schwarz and Professor Stefan Ballmer were officially granted promotion to Professor by the Board of Trustees.
Yudaisy Salomón Sargentón was hired as new Operations Specialist for the Physics Department. Yudy has been our outstanding administrative assistant for many years. We are so excited to be able to recognize her hard work with a promotion to this new position. The Operations Specialist oversees operations and process organization for the department.
Lab manager Sam Sampere has been elected Vice Chair of the AAPT section representative committee. In addition, the program for the upcoming AAPT virtual winter meeting features a photo from a workshop that Sam developed and led at last year’s conference.
Awards and Recognitions
Physics Department Financial Manager, Patti Ford, was recognized for our outstanding contributions to inspiring women runners in the local community. She has won the Mountain Goat Run twice! See the Instagram post.
Professor Liviu Movileanu was awarded a new US Patent based on work from his lab by Dr. Avinash Kumar Thakur. Avinash is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Genentech in San Francisco, CA, a leading biotech company.
Prof. Scott Watson was recognized as a 2021 Outstanding Referee for Physical Review journals this year!
Some of our faculty and staff members were recognized this year at the One University Awards Ceremony. The virtual event was held Friday, May 7. Professors Simon Catterall, Tomasz Skwarnicki and Gianfranco Vidali as well as Lab Manager Sam Sampere and Machinist Charlie Brown were all presented with an anniversary gift from the College of Arts and Sciences to commemorate their time and contributions to the University. This yearly event celebrates excellence on the Syracuse University campus.
Other News
Professor Marina Artuso led a group for the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors in the Division of Particles and Fields at the American Physical Society. The meeting had over 400 participants and is setting the goals for high energy experimental physics for the future.
Professor Steve Blusk and the LHCb Group published a new paper on proton-proton collisions in Physical Review D. Check it out here.
Professor Lisa Manning and a team including postdoc, Dr. Paula Sanematsu, and collaborators in Biology and at SUNY-Upstate have been highlighted for their new NIH award and exciting research on developmental biology. Read the article.
Professor Emeritus Allen Miller has been awarded a grant entitled: Enhancing the Teaching of High School Physics in Central New York. He hosts a yearly workshop to provide physics high school teachers with new and relevant tools and ideas for experiments that have been ongoing for 30 years! This year, we will celebrate this milestone with larger events.
Professor Alison Patteson gave a talk at the New and Notable Symposium at the Biophysical Society! share recent work on the role of intermediate filaments on cell mechanics and virus infection at this prominent speaking engagement. Her work was just featured in the College of Arts and Sciences News to highlight a new grant with Prof. Jennifer Schwarz on the biophysics of COVID-19.
Professor Alison Patteson will be awarded a new grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the Role of Vimentin in Mammalian Cell Motility. The grant is for five years and is through the Maximizing Investigators Research Award (MIRA – R35) mechanism.
Professor Joey Paulsen and his collaborator Prof. Nathan Keim (Penn State) had a new manuscript accepted for publication in Science Advances, titled: “Multiperiodic orbits from interacting soft spots in cyclically-sheared amorphous solids.”
Professor Jennifer Ross was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health/DHHS entitled Regulating Microtubule Severing Physically and Chemically.
Professor Jennifer Schwarz received a new grant award from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health on Emergent Properties of Cancer.
Professor Tomasz Skwarnicki gave an invited review talk on "Exotics" on Monday, May 31st at the 10th International Workshop on Charm Physics (Charm 2020).
Professor Paul Souder and PhD student D.E. King, as part of the PREX collaboration, has published a new paper entitled “Accurate Determination of the Neutron Skin Thickness of 208 Pb through Parity-Violation in Electron Scattering.” Read the paper by visiting the APS Physical Review Letters page. The paper had multiple mentions in different science publications: Physic Magazine, Science, Science News, Gizmodo and The Academic Times.
Professor Paul Souder was awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation to support his work on understanding Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reactions. Read more about it.
The LHCb experiment recently produced new results on a Lepton Flavor Universality test in B meson decays. The results have been widely discussed in the media including Scientific American. An interview with Professor Sheldon Stone discussing the findings is posted at Science Friday. Prof. Sheldon Stone was also invited to present a virtual talk at the National Academy’s Board on Physics and Astronomy meeting on Friday, April 23rd.
Professor Sheldon Stone gave an invited talk on LHCb and its Upgrades at the Flavor Physics and CP Violation conference in Fudan, China.
Professor Emeritus Kameshwar Wali has a new book entitled “Fads and Fancies of Elementary Particle Physics. Selected Works of Kameshwar C. Wali.” and are available for pre-order from Amazon.
In the Media
Professor Lisa Manning published an OpEd at Syracuse.com on masks for kids. Check it out here.
Professor Jennifer Ross was interviewed in a news article in Physics Today on the gender profile of biological physics: “Why does biophysics attract a disproportionate number of women?” Read more here. Dr. Ross also published a new article in Science Advances as part of her KECK Foundation Collaboration. The College of Arts & Sciences highlighted it with a little news article.
Professor Scott Watson is an author on a new article published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics on the early universe!