Undergraduate student Lauren Laufman-Wollitzer received a $4,000 grant from the UW Housing WISE (women in science and engineering) learning community to work in Prof. Cary Forest’s lab to further the understanding of shock formation, propagation, and dissipation in astrophysical plasmas. Lauren will build a compact toroid injector to accomplish the experiments.
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Physics Majors Invited to Join Phi Beta Kappa
Five Physics majors have been invited to join Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honor society http://pbk.wisc.edu/. Students are invited to join on the basis of demonstrated achievement in breadth and depth of study in the liberal arts. The Wisconsin Chapter traditionally invites no more than three or four percent of the University’s bachelor’s degree candidates to join.
Our honorees are:
Zachary Briesemeister
Leah Fulmer
William Milner
Colin Wahl
Ruifeng Xie
Please congratulate them!
Students Create World-Changing Social Enterprises at the 2016 UW-Madison Hult Prize Competition
Josh Cherek and Team Metrecycle have advanced to the international competition after taking top place in the 2nd Annual Hult Prize Competition at the Wisconsin School of Business. The team consisting of Josh Cherek, Jennifer Sharpe, Alex Valaitis, and Luke VandenLangenberg will now compete at the Hult Prize regional finals in March 2016 hosted by one of Hult International Business School’s five campuses in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai or Shanghai.
BadgerLoop wins 3rd in SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition
A team of University of Wisconsin—Madison engineering students won 3rd place overall in a worldwide competition to design a pod for shuttling people on a futuristic high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop. The team will build its test pod in a workspace in Chamberlin Hall. Professor Duncan Carlsmith awarded BadgerLoop a mini grant from the Garage Physics makerspace to develop and prototype the pod system.
Danny Crow Wins Teaching Assistant Award
Danny Crow, Ph.D. candidate in condensed matter theory, has been awarded a 2015 L&S Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Award!
Once More, Into the Breach
In 1986 and 1988 Henry (Heinz) Barschall, a respected nuclear physicist at the University of Wisconsin, editor of Physical Review C and what was then the APS Publications Oversight Committee, wrote articles in Physics Today that presented the results of a study of the cost of library subscriptions to physics journals. The consequences of Barschall’s studies provide a cautionary tale on what can go wrong when scientific and commercial interests collide.
Prof. Duncan Carlsmith wins Kemper K. Knapp Bequest for Garage Physics
Professor Duncan Carlsmith has been awarded a $6000 from the Kemper K. Knapp Bequest for Garage Physics. The Knapp Bequest favors projects that cross departmental lines and have an impact on the educational and cultural life of the university community, particularly projects that benefit undergraduate students.
Prof. Peter Timbie wins Faculty Development Grant
Prof. Peter Timbie will work on new materials for Physics 103-104 in conjunction with the REACH program during Fall 2016.
Holiday Colloquium
Cosmic Radio Bursts Yield First Clues About Their Origins
With the help of the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, a team of researchers that includes University of Wisconsin-Madison physicists has produced the first detailed portrait of a Fast Radio Burst – a brief but highly energetic pulse of radio waves from unknown sources in the distant universe.
-Terry Devitt, (608) 262-8282, trdevitt@wisc.edu
CONTACT: Peter Timbie, (608) 890-2002, pttimbie@wisc.edu