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.
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!
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.
Entrepreneur award winners turn ideas into impact — from farming to fashion to fusion
Established in 2011, the Chancellor’s Entrepreneurial Achievement Award recognizes UW–Madison innovators and alumni who have contributed to economic growth and the social good, serving as entrepreneurial models for the UW community and inspiring the campus culture of entrepreneurship.
UW–Madison scientists part of team awarded Breakthrough Prize in Physics
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A team of 13,508 scientists, including over 100 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced April 5. The Prize recognized work conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) between 2015 and 2024.
The Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate the wonders of our scientific age. The $3 million prize will be donated to the CERN & Society Foundation, which offers financial support to doctoral students to conduct research at CERN.
Four LHC projects were awarded, including ATLAS and CMS, both of which UW–Madison scientists work on. ATLAS and CMS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and its discovery opened up many new avenues of research. In the years since, LHC researchers have worked towards a better understanding of this important particle because it interacts with all matter and gives other particles their mass. Both teams are actively engaged in analyzing LHC data in search of exciting and new physics.
“The LHC experiments have produced more than 3000 combined papers covering studies of electroweak physics and the Higgs boson, searches for dark matter, understanding quantum chromodynamics, and studying the symmetries of fundamental physics,” says CMS researcher Kevin Black, chair of the UW–Madison department of physics. “This work represents the combined contributions of many thousands of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, and has taken decades to come to fruition. We are all very excited to be recognized with this award.”
Over 13,000 LHC researchers were awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize, including a subset of the ATLAS team seen here. | Source: CERN
ATLAS and CMS have generally the same research goals, but different technical ways of addressing them. Both detectors probe the aftermath of particle collisions at the LHC and use the detectors’ high-precision measurements to address questions about the Standard Model of particle physics, the building blocks of matter and dark matter, exotic particles, extra dimensions, supersymmetry, and more.
The ATLAS team at UW–Madison has taken a leadership role in both physics analyses and computing. They have spearheaded precision measurements of the Higgs boson’s properties and conducted extensive searches for new physics, including Dark Matter, achieving major sensitivity gains through advanced AI and machine learning techniques. In addition to leading developments in computing infrastructure, the team has played a crucial role in the High-Level Trigger system and simulation efforts using generative AI, further enhancing the experiment’s capabilities.
The CMS team at UW–Madison has played and continues to play key roles in trigger electronics systems, which are ways of sorting through the tens of millions of megabytes of data produced each second by a collider experiment and retaining the most meaningful events. They also manage a large computing cluster at UW-Madison, contribute to the building and operating of muon detectors, make key contributions to CMS trigger and computing operations, and develop physics analysis techniques including AI/ML. The CMS group efforts are well recognized in the recently published compendium of results, dubbed, the Stairway to Heaven.
CMS and ATLAS research at UW–Madison is largely supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, with additional support from the National Science Foundation.
The following people had a UW–Madison affiliation during the time noted by the Prize:
Current Professors
Kevin Black, Tulika Bose, Kyle Cranmer, Sridhara Dasu, Matthew Herndon, Sau Lan Wu
Current PhD Physicists
Pieter Everaerts, Matthew Feickert, Camilla Galloni, Alexander Held, Wasikul Islam, Charis Koraka, Abdollah Mohammadi, Ajit Mohapatra, Laurent Pétré, Deborah Pinna, Jay Sandesara, Alexandre Savin, Varun Sharma, Werner Wiedenmann
Sunanda Banerjee (Senior Scientist), Richard Loveless (Distinguished Senior Scientist), Wesley H. Smith (Professor)
Alumni
Michalis Bachtis (Ph.D. 2012), Swagato Banerjee (Postdoc 2015), Austin Belknap (Ph.D. 2015), James Buchanan (Ph.D. 2019), Cecile Caillol (Postdoc), Duncan Carlsmith (Professor), Maria Cepeda (Postdoc), Jay Chan (Ph.D. 2023), Stephane Cooperstein (B.S. 2014), Isabelle De Bruyn (Scientist), Senka Djuric (Postdoc), Laura Dodd (Ph.D. 2018), Keegan Downham (B.S. 2020), Evan Friis (Postdoc), Bhawna Gomber (Postdoc), Lindsey Gray (Ph.D. 2012), Monika Grothe (Scientist), Wen Guan (Engineer with PhD 2022), Andrew Straiton Hard (Ph.D. 2018), Yang Heng (Ph.D. 2019), Usama Hussain (Ph.D. 2020), Haoshuang Ji (Ph.D. 2019), Xiangyang Ju (Ph.D. 2018), Laser Seymour Kaplan (Ph.D. 2019), Lashkar Kashif (Postdoc 2019), Pamela Klabbers (Scientist), Evan Koenig (BS 2018, Intern), Amanda Kaitlyn Kruse (Ph.D. 2015), Armando Lanaro (Senior Scientist), Jessica Leonard (Ph.D. 2011), Aaron Levine (Ph.D. 2016), Andrew Loeliger (Ph.D. 2022), Kenneth Long (Ph.D. 2019), Jithin Madhusudanan Sreekala (Ph.D. 2022) Yao Ming (Ph.D. 2018), Isobel Ojalvo (Ph.D. 2014, Postdoc), Lauren Melissa Osojnak (Ph.D. 2020), Tom Perry (Ph.D. 2016), Elois Petruska (BS, 2021), Yan Qian (Undergraduate Student 2023), Tyler Ruggles (Ph.D. 2018, Postdoc), Tapas Sarangi (Scientist), Victor Shang (Ph.D. 2024), Manuel Silva (Ph.D. 2019), Nick Smith (Ph.D. 2018), Amy Tee (Postdoc, 2023), Stephen Trembath-Reichert (M.S. 2020), Ho-Fung Tsoi (Ph.D. 2024), Devin Taylor (Ph.D. 2017), Wren Vetens (Ph.D. 2024), Alex Zeng Wang (Ph.D. 2023), Fuquan Wang (Ph.D. 2019), Nate Woods (Ph.D. 2017), Hongtao Yang (Ph.D. 2016), Fangzhou Zhang (Ph.D. 2018), Rui Zhang (Postdoc, 2025), Chen Zhou (Postdoc 2021)
Three grad students recognized as L&S Teaching Mentors
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Physics PhD students Sam Kramer, Michelle Marrero Garcia, and Isaac Barnhill were recently named to the L&S Teaching Mentors program. The L&S Teaching Mentors are the heart of L&S’s Teaching Assistant (TA) Trainings. They are exceptionally passionate and knowledgeable teachers with proven track records for teaching excellence who work closely with the L&S TA Training and Support Team to facilitate various trainings and mentor L&S TAs.
Kramer and Marrero Garcia earned Lead Teaching Mentor designation, meaning that they have served as Teaching Mentors more than once and are taking on an additional leadership role within the program.
Learn more about the three Physics Teaching Mentors:
Isaac Barnhill
Isaac Barnhill, Teaching Mentor
Isaac began teaching as a peer mentor tutor in the UW Physics Learning Center during undergraduate studies. Now a PhD student in the Physics Department, Isaac has primarily taught electromagnetism, circuits, and optics at the introductory level. Isaac’s research is focused on increasing student agency and decision making in the laboratory component of their physics classes. By shifting the focus of lab activities from content reinforcement to engaging in authentic scientific practices, Isaac hopes to increase students’ sense of engagement and intellectual ownership in the classroom while simultaneously helping students build their data literacy and critical thinking skills. One of his favorite aspects of teaching is seeing students improve their ability to understand, describe, and predict the physical world around them. He always seeks to center the student by promoting active learning in the classroom, allowing students to work out their thoughts in an environment with both high expectations and high support.
Michelle Marrero Garcia
Michelle Marrero Garcia, Lead Teaching Mentor
Michelle started teaching in her first semester of the Physics PhD program. She has taught either kinematics or electromagnetism at the introductory level (every semester since then), but she loves teaching any subject within Physics. Her favorite part is watching the face of her students light up as they explore the world through a new lens. In Michelle’s approach to teaching, she always tries to be empathic and put herself in the student’s position. She has found that having changed her field of study from mechanical engineering (as an undergrad) to physics (as a grad) gave her the ability to understand how students that are new to the subject think and feel.
Sam Kramer
Sam Kramer, Lead Teaching Mentor
Sam is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics and has been teaching for Physics 202, a course for engineering major undergraduates that focuses on electricity, magnetism, and optics, since arriving in Madison. Sam also taught for a similar course as an undergraduate at Saint Louis University. In this role, he leads both discussions, which focus on problem solving, and labs, which provide hands-on experience with the concepts being taught. Physics can be an overwhelming subject, so Sam tries to distill the material into manageable chunks for the students, emphasizing the broader concepts underlying the formulas students use and drawing explicit connections between parts of the curricula. This is meant to develop the dynamic problem solving skills students need when encountering problems they have not seen before.
Dan McCammon awarded Distinguished Career Prize
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Dan McCammon
Congrats to Prof. Dan McCammon for earning the Distinguished Career Award from The American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) for his pioneering work on the development of microcalorimeters that has led to breakthroughs in X-ray astronomy and on soft diffuse X-ray background.
The HEAD Distinguished Career Prize is awarded at the time of the Division Meeting to recognize an individual high-energy astrophysicist who has made outstanding contributions to the field of high energy astrophysics throughout their career. Outstanding contributions include a body of important research results (observational, theoretical or experimental) which have led to ground-breaking results in high-energy astrophysics, and/or a career of mentorship to a new generation of high-energy astrophysicists, especially if this mentorship helped to support under-represented or under-resourced scientists and increased the diversity of the HEA community. The winner gives an invited talk at the Divisional Meeting in the award year. The prize carries a cash award of $1500.
AAS announced many 2025 prizes today; the full list can be found at their website.
This post is adapted from the AAS news release and website linked within the text.
Physics major Caleb Youngwerth wins poster prize at APS Eastern Great Lakes meeting
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Caleb Youngwerth
Congrats to physics, astronomy-physics, mathematics and french major Caleb Youngwerth on winning the Meeting Award for Undergraduate Student Poster at the Fall 2024 meeting of the Eastern Great Lakes Section of APS!
Youngwerth’s poster, entitled, “Harnessing Molecular Simulation of the DLVO Potential to Engineer New Battery Technologies,” was presented at the meeting held October 18-19 at Marietta College in Ohio. The work was conducted in the chemical and biological engineering group of Prof. Rose Cersonsky.
The award was announced at the meeting and comes with a cash prize.
Congrats to Prof. Baha Balantekin on winning the American Physical Society’s 2025 Hans A. Bethe prize!
The Bethe prize is awarded to recognize outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields. Balantekin won “for seminal contributions to neutrino physics and astrophysics — especially the neutrino flavor transformation problem — both for solar neutrinos and the nonlinear supernova environment.”
Balantekin works at the intersection of particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. For much of his career, he has studied theoretical aspects of neutrino transport originating in the Sun, supernovae, or neutron star mergers.
“The concepts (I brought to the field) were marrying neutrino physics with many-body physics,” Balantekin says. “Of course, incorporating many-body aspects is common in condensed matter and nuclear physics, but it’s not as common in environments studied in astrophysics.”
Several fundamental astrophysical processes produce neutrinos as byproducts, and scientists have been studying neutrino origins and patterns for decades. Detecting the Sun’s neutrinos can reveal insights into its nuclear reactions, for example, and detecting neutrinos from core collapse supernovae can reveal insights into the early universe.
Balantekin’s early research was on the theory of neutrino transport from the Sun. He has also been studying core collapse supernovae, the result of a star running out of nuclear fuel. During collapse, a very hot star cools very quickly, emitting neutrinos on the order of 10^58.
“A number of that magnitude means you can no longer ignore the neutrino-neutrino interactions,” Balantekin says. “And then it becomes a very interesting many-body problem, where you have two-body interactions between neutrinos, and the propagation, and then it becomes a very complex problem.”
Balantekin and department collaborators in 1995. Balantekin is seated, right. Seated next to him is former PhD student Alan DeWeerd. Standing row, L-R: Franco Ruggeri, John Beacom, Jonathan Fetter, late physics professor Kirk McVoy, and William Friedman.
To describe this problem, has more recently begun using techniques from quantum information science to study entanglement of neutrinos with each other and to look at the signatures of such interactions and how they might contribute to heavy element formation.
The Bethe Prize was awarded solely to Balantekin, but he says he would not have won it without his collaborators over the years.
“You don’t do work in a vacuum,” Balantekin says. “I’ve worked with a lot of very talented young people. I would like to acknowledge first not only my graduate students at Wisconsin, but also the Fellows who came from the N3AS Physics Frontier Center we have. And the people I collaborate with around the world. We also have colleagues here in the department like Sue Coppersmith and Mark Saffman who contributed many ideas.”
The Bethe prize consists of $10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient. It is presented annually.
Britton Plourde elected Fellow of the American Physical Society
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Britton Plourde (credit: Syracuse University)
Congratulations to Prof. Britton Plourde for being elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society!
Plourde was elected “For important contributions to the physics and operation of superconducting qubits, including the development of techniques for scalable qubit control and readout, and investigations of decoherence from vortices and nonequilibrium quasiparticles.” He was nominated by the Division of Quantum Information Fellowship.
APS Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one’s professional peers for outstanding contributions to physics. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership is recognized by this honor.
