Physics & Astronomy
1000 E. University, Dept 3905
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: 307-766-6150
Fax: 307-766-2652
Email: physics@uwyo.edu
2024
Open Research Scientist positions at the School of Computing: Click here to learn more
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships for AI-enabled Interdisciplinary Research - Please see Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship opportunities for AI-enabled interdisciplinary research Here. To explore potential advisors, please go to this page Here.
Dr. Meridith Joyce received a NASA TESS GI Cycle 7 grant entitled A Five-Fold Increase In "Holy Grail"Calibrators For Stellar Models: Doubly-Oscillating Binaries Pre-Screened With GAIA. What a way to start her job at UW with a one-year $70K bang!
Congratulations to Adam Myers for his DOE renewal grant. Adam's rolling grant to support planning and operations for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument was renewed by the Department of Energy for another $240k over the next 18 months. The grant has now brought in $640k since 2019.
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Jifa Tian and his Co-PI, TeYu Chien, have been awarded a three- year NSF grant entitled "Collaborative Research: Exploring Metastable Magnetic States in Unconventional Magnetic Domains of Two-dimensional van der Waals Magnets". The Partner institute for this collaborative research project is CSU, and budget for UW is $483,605.
Alex Petrovic secured a three-year $249,889 NSF grant " Microwave Spectroscopy of Engineered Triplet Superconductors" July 2024
Alex Petrovic has received from Quantum Collaborative a research grant Broadband Microwave Spectromicroscopy" ($53K), which is a joint effort between him and a colleague at Arizona State University.
Mike Brotherton has received a Space Telescope Science Institute grant $31,538) titled "A Major Overhaul of Ultraviolet-Based Black Hole Mass Prescriptions".
TeYu Chien received an Interdisciplinary-Collaborative Seed Grants from CEPS Engineering Initiative. The title is “Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Concrete and Masonry Structures”. This is a $25K joint project with Jenny Eisenhauer Tanner (Civil and Architectural Engineering). June 2024
Congratulation to Jifa Tian for another 2-year $300K grant! NSF RII Track-4 EPSCoR Research Fellows: Exploring van der Waals Superconducting Josephson Junctions for Robust Qubits
Good news. Jinke and Maohong Fan (Energy and Petroleum Engineering) are Co-PIs of a DOE project for Engineering Highly-Scalable and Efficient Sorption Materials for Direct Air Capture. The visiting scholar proposal was selected for award negotiation. The 3-year project is led by New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a total budget of $1.5M. UW's share is $700K.
Both Daniel Dale and Mike Brotherton were awarded time (and funding!) on the Hubble Space Telescope. Here are the details of Danny's award. I will share it with you when I receive the information on Mike B's award.
Title: Resolving Gas, Star Formation, and Feedback in Nearby Galaxies with HST+JWST+ALMA
PI: Daniel Dale
Source: NASA Hubble Space Telescope
Amount: $115k to UW (~$1.7M in total for the larger team)
P&A faculty member Jifa Tian has been appointed by VPRED Parag Chitnis as the Interim Direct of the newly established Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology (C-QIST) at UW.
4/20/2024 Undergraduates presentation: Xander Larsen and Gabby Graham followed by a Poster sessions at the Wyoming Union.
4/17/2024 Provost Carman and Dean Wright attended the P&A faculty meeting to present awards to Daniel Dale the George Duke Humphrey Distiguished Faculty Award for 2024. Aysenur Bicer was also awarded the John P. "Jack" Elbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching award for 2024.
4/17/2024 The University of Wyoming is inviting applications for Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows for conducting convergence research at the intersection of different disciplines. This year, the program will support a cohort of up to six postdoctoral fellows for two-year terms. Postdoctoral fellows participating in the program will receive professional development opportunities, including entrepreneurship-focused workshops, and mentorship from experts in at least two disciplines. Projects involving collaboration with DOE National Laboratories are encouraged.
This year, the research projects will focus on AI applications in one or more of the following topics. Use of modeling, simulation, digital twins, and other approaches are encouraged in the research projects. Additional information and How to Apply.
4/1/2024 Aysenur Bicer was selected to receive the 2024 Promoting Intellectual Engagement in the First Year (PIE) Award! Dr. Bicer will be honored at the 15th annual PIE Award Reception, Thursday, April 25th in the Union Yellowstone Ballroom from 4:00-5:00 pm. Dr. Bicer will also be Highlighted on the LeaRN Website.
3/18/2024 Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bair, first-year physics student received an internship for summer 2024 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO.
3/11/2024 Physics and Astronomy Receives Award for Graduating Students in Physics Teaching. Click link for more information: Award for Graduating Students
2/29/2024 Professor Jinke Tang, who heads the Department, has been appointed to serve as a member of DOE's Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) for a 3-year term ending at the end of 2026. The Committee, established in 1986, provides advice and recommendations on scientific, technical, and programmatic issues relating to DOE's Basic Energy Sciences Program including materials sciences, chemistry, biosciences, geosciences, engineering and underlying competencies such as computational sciences.
2/15/2024 Daniel Dale, Assoc Dean/Professor, was elected as a Trustee of the American Astronomical Society (with the entire membership of the AAS voting). What an amazing honor and significant responsibility. A wonderful level of recognition of which he is most deserving.
1/17/2024 Congratulations to Professor Mike Pierce for being awarded time on NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility. The project is called A Radial Velocity Analysis of the Classical Cepheid T Vul from Near-IR Spectroscopy with collaborators Kristin Brady and Caty Pilachowski at Indiana University.
The University of Wyoming’s Department of Physics and Astronomy has received the 5+ Club award for graduating students in physics teaching during the 2022-23 academic year, placing UW among the top 1 percent of institutions nationwide.
The 5+ Club offers national recognition to Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) member institutions that graduate five or more physics teachers in a single academic year. Induction marks a significant contribution toward resolving the severe national shortage of physics teachers and indicates that the institution is a national leader in the production of teachers
Provost Carman and Dean Cam Wright came to the faculty meeting on April 17 to present awards to Aysenur Bicer (John P. “Jack” Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching award for 2024) and Daniel Dale (the George Duke Humphrey Distinguished Faculty Award for 2024). Congratulations!
12/4/2023 Congratulations to Graduate Student David King for receiving the Carlton R. Barkhurst Dissertation Fellowship for the spring 2024 semester!
11/28/2023 Let's congratulate Assoc. Dean, Daniel Dale for another Windy Ridge gift!$50,000 to complete the pledge for Astro Camp, $95,000 for the UW Harry Vaughn Astronomy Professorship, and a gift to support Native American Summer Institute again.
11/7/2023 Congratulations to Graduate Student, Kiana Henny for receiving funding for her project “Munich Astronomy Collaborative Meeting” from the Center for Global Studies! She will receive an award in the amount of $2,000 to support her travel to the conference
10/6/2023 Professor Michael Brotherton hosted the 2023 Public WIRO Open House for another successful event.
7/20/2023 Let's welcome (back) Lecturer Assistant, Dr. Rich Barrans who will join us as a temporary lecturer this fall.
6/16/2023 Professor TeYu Chien received an SER grant to convert carbon material to nuclear-grade graphite! Title: Metal-assisted microwave treatment for converting carbon materials into nuclear-grade graphite. It is a one-year project with a budget of $153,405.
6/20/2023 Assistant Professor Jifa Tian received a new DOE grant "Manipulating the topology and superconductivity in 2M-phase WX2 (X = S and Se)" with a budget of $561,835! Brian Leonard in Chemistry is his Co-PI on the project.
6/2/2023 Dr. Yu-Tsung (Rem) Tsai has accepted the Assistant Professor position offer and will be joining the department us this Fall.
Undergraduate major, Tera Swaby has been accepted to attend the APS CUWiP conference this January at the University of Iowa.
5/11/2023 Let's congratulate Daniel Dale for receiving the good news that 5 of the Cycle 2 James Webb Space Telescope proposals he contributed to were successful. He is CoPI on a ~$600k project and coI on the other four. 5/3/2023 Congratulations to both Chip Kobulnicky for the Graduate Council's 2022-23 Distigueshed Graduate Faculty Mentor Award and TeYu Chien for the Graduate Council's 2022-23 Mid-Career Graduate Faculty Mentor Award!
Let's Congratulate Assoc. Dean, Daniel Dale for another $175K raised from the Windy Ridge Foundation, which includes $100K for the Vaughan Professorship, $50K for Astro Camp 2023 and $25K for the Native American Summer Institute. Together, Danny has ~$3M from them going back to 2013!
Congratulations to our former PhD students Josh Heiner and Subash Kattel and former postdoc Joe Murphy for their new NSF SBIR grant! SLD Photonics has recently been awarded an SBIR NSF grant of $256K. The owners of SLD Photonics are Subash Kattel, Joshua Heiner (two PhD graduate students from our department) and Joseph Murphy - a former post doc in our department. SLD Photonics is a start-up company seeking to further develop research that was originally performed in the Physics department at the University of Wyoming. The innovation is a single broadband detector - using the spin Seebeck effect - that can span from 390-2200nm with a featureless quantum efficiency. They are based here in Laramie. Feel free to follow their LinkenIn page.
The University of Wyoming Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a Lab Coordinator to lead our instructional Laboratories team. This is a full-time position to serve as teaching support in the introductory lab courses offered by the department. Click here to apply!
Assistant Professor Jifa Tian receives NSF grant to study, Bloster Quantum Information Science and Engineering, click here to read the article.
10/14/2022 Professor Michael Brotherton hosted the 2022 Public WIRO Observatory Open House for another successful event.
4/12/2024 Tunneling current-controlled spin states in few-layer van der Waals magnets_-Nature Communication
3/7/2024 Exploring Unconventional Superconductivity in 2M-WS2 thin layers; by Piumi Samarawickrama
2024-physics-astronomy newsletter
Physics & Astronomy
1000 E. University, Dept 3905
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: 307-766-6150
Fax: 307-766-2652
Email: physics@uwyo.edu