Month: May 2025

Nathan Wagner named 2025 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation scholar

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This post is adapted from an announcement originally made by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation

profile photo of Nathan Wagner
Nathan Wagner

The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation recently announced its 2025 class of Astronaut Scholars, including University of Wisconsin–Madison physics and math major Nathan Wagner.

For 2025, a total of 74 undergraduate students from 51 universities and colleges across the United States will each receive up to $15,000. ASF will present this year’s Astronaut Scholars during its Innovators Symposium & Gala featuring the Neil Armstrong™ Award of Excellence on Aug. 13-16, 2025, at the Omni Houston Hotel in Houston, Texas.

Asked what the scholarship means to him, Wagner says:

“I’m humbled to receive this award — it’s a huge honor to represent UW–Madison and its Physics Department on the national level. The Astronaut Scholarship and its benefits are very inspiring and promise to provide years of guidance and mentorship to my fellow 2025 ASF peers and I. I thank the UW–Madison ASF liaison office and its selection committee for nominating me for national consideration. I also thank the many advisors, faculty, primary investigators, supervisors, staff, mentors and family who have supported me to this time in my life. I’m sincerely grateful for the recognition and commit to supporting ASF’s challenge to continue work that will push the boundaries of science and technology.”

“I am thrilled to see Nathan Wagner receiving this recognition for his exceptional dedication and ability as an undergraduate scholar contributing at the forefront of research in atomic and quantum physics,” says UW–Madison physics professor Mark Saffman, Wagner’s research advisor.

Adds UW–Madison physics professor Deniz Yavuz, Wagner’s academic advisor, “Nathan is one of the best undergraduate students that I have ever interacted with. I expect great things from him, and he is fully deserving of this award.”

ASF’s Astronaut Scholarship is offered to junior and senior-year college students pursuing degrees in STEM. The process begins with nominations from professors or faculty members at an ASF-partnering university. Upon selection, each student receives a scholarship up to $15,000. Additional highlights include exclusive mentorship and professional networking with astronauts, alumni and industry leaders. Astronaut Scholars also take part in the Michael Collins Family Professional Development Program and receive a fully funded trip to attend ASF’s Innovators Symposium & Gala, including a technical conference where Astronaut Scholars showcase their cutting-edge research.

ASF awarded its first seven $1,000 scholarships in 1986 to pay tribute to the pioneering Mercury 7 Astronauts — Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. The program was championed by the six surviving Mercury 7 Astronauts, along with Betty Grissom (widow of Gus Grissom), Dr. William Douglas (Project Mercury’s flight surgeon) and Orlando philanthropist Henri Landwirth. What began as a powerful tribute, quickly evolved into a national commitment to support exceptional college students pursuing degrees in STEM. Since then, over the past 40 years, more than $10 million has been awarded to more than 850 college students.

Summer filled with physics conferences and workshops

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Summer at UW–Madison is filled with trips to the Terrace, amazing weather, and usually a break from classes. Physicists in Madison this summer can add one more thing to the list this summer: over a half dozen conferences, workshops, symposia and undergraduate research programs hosted on or near campus.

UW physics summer conference season kicks off with Quantum Summer School on May 28 and ends with Lepton-Photon on August 29. You’ll likely run into some old colleagues, or meet some new ones as they explore Chamberlin and Madison over the next few months. Learn about all our conferences offerings this year.

In addition to these conferences, Physics is also hosting two Research Experiences for Undergrads (REUs): the Open Quantum Initiative and the CMS experiment are each hosting two undergraduate students.

Matt Otten earns Air Force Young Investigator Research Program award

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Matt Otten has won an Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award, offered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The program intends to support early-career scientists and engineers who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. Nearly 40 awards were expected to be made in this cycle.

The three-year, $450,000 award will fund a postdoctoral fellow in Otten’s group, who will work on quantum characterization, verification, and validation (QCVV) of quantum computers. QCVV asks if a quantum computer is working and what the device’s limitations are, in an effort to engineer a better system in future iterations.

With any quantum computer, researchers input different tasks and calculations under different conditions, then receive back some classical data that describes the quantum state. Otten describes what happens between input and output as “a black box.”

“Our work is trying to open that black box and put in physics,” Otten says. “And we’re starting from a good place: we already have good models of what those qubits do and how they’re supposed to behave, and we can fit the parameters of the model to the observations of the data.”

Otten’s group will collaborate with experimentalists on their quantum computers. If the data fit the model, it suggests that the quantum computer is behaving as predicted and that the researchers understand the full process. But if the date do not — and given that a major impediment to quantum computing has been understanding and controlling errors, this scenario is more likely — then the researchers will need to determine why.

“That’s the goal of the research, to develop the techniques so that we can tie the errors that we see in the data to a physical source for that error, and then we can give feedback to the experimentalists,” Otten says. “And maybe they can tell me what went wrong without doing this complicated QCVV, but as we build bigger and bigger systems, this problem becomes harder to solve.”

Gage Erwin named DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow

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This post is adapted from the DOE’s announcement regarding the Computational Science Fellows

Congrats to physics PhD student Gage Erwin on being named a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow!

Photo of Gage Erwin
Gage Erwin

The 2025-2026 incoming fellows will learn to apply high-performance computing (HPC) to research in disciplines including machine learning, quantum computing, chemistry, astrophysics, computational biology, energy, engineering and applied mathematics.

The program, established in 1991 and funded by the DOE’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), trains top leaders in computational science.

“We are so pleased to congratulate the 30 new fellows,” said Ceren Susut, Associate Director of Science for DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program. “Each of these incredibly talented people has demonstrated both outstanding academic achievement and tremendous research potential. Their research topics cover some of the highest priorities of the Department of Energy, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and science and engineering for energy and nuclear security.”

Fellows receive support that includes a stipend, tuition, and fees, and an annual academic allowance. Renewable for up to four years, the fellowship is guided by a comprehensive program of study that requires focused coursework in science and engineering, computer science, applied mathematics and HPC. It also includes a three-month practicum at one of 22 DOE-approved sites across the country, and an annual meeting where fellows present their research in poster and talk formats.