Dear Alumni and Friends,

This year has had both its share of challenges and fortuitous successes. Student interest in physics continues to grow, evidenced by the ever-increasing number of undergraduate majors and applications to our PhD program. Our faculty continue to garner awards and honors. Demand for our educational outreach programs, both by campus visitors and in the community, is near the greatest we have seen. But we are also in a time of budget cuts, funding uncertainty, and challenges to the 80-year partnership between the federal government and research universities. But first, the stories of triumph despite those challenges!

One exciting recent development has been the success of our newest non-majors course, Physics 106: Physics of Sports. In three years, Dr. Jim Reardon has grown enrollment from 36 to 300 students in Fall 2025. Certainly the topic is interesting enough to draw in students who are looking to satisfy their physical sciences breadth requirement, but that is unlikely to be the only reason the course is so popular. Jim treats lecture like a spectacle, drawing students in with active learning and demonstrations that depict the laws of physics and how they apply to sports in a familiar way, before getting to the math and science behind the physics.

This summer, our department also celebrated the culmination of over a decade of work by Prof. Keith Bechtol and his group on the commissioning of the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It also marked the transition to the data collection phase. Rubin Observatory will capture the entire southern hemisphere sky every three nights over its anticipated 10-year run, and is leveling the playing field for astronomers around the world by making the data and analysis tools accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

This year, we welcomed four new junior faculty members. String theorist Prof. Jakob Moritz joined back in January, and his research seeks to understand how precisely the particle physics and cosmological history of our universe can arise from string theory. High energy theorist Prof. Joshua Foster joined in August, and his research focus includes searches for dark matter, gravitational waves, and new Physics. AMO experimentalist Prof. Josiah Sinclair also joined in August. He specializes in neutral atom quantum computing, and is looking for ways to build bigger and better processors modularly, by linking multiple smaller systems using single photons traveling through optical fibers. Lastly, Prof. Mariel Pettee joined in August as part of Chancellor Mnookin’s RISE (Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence) initiative, in this case, RISE-AI, focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning. A particle physicist by training, her work is broadly interdisciplinary, using AI approaches to address problems in high energy physics, astrophysics, and more.

In January, we celebrated the well-earned retirement of Prof. Mark Rzchowski, a condensed matter experimentalist and longtime associate chair. Mark’s work in electronic, spintronic, and structural correlations in complex thin film systems, combined with his impact on education in our department, will be greatly missed. In October, we learned of the passing of Prof. Paul Quin, a key player in the department’s nuclear physics program in the 1970s and 80s. He was a postdoc here from 1969-71, then held a faculty position until his retirement in 2001.

Our current faculty continue to earn honors in their respective fields. Prof. Mark Saffman, a pioneer in neutral atom qubits, won the American Physical Society’s 2026 Ramsey Award, one of the, if not the, top prizes in AMO physics. He won “for seminal developments of quantum information processing with neutral atoms that allow the investigation of many-body problems that are intractable by classical computing.” AMO physicist Prof. Deniz Yavuz was elected an APS Fellow “for outstanding experimental and theoretical contributions to nanoscale localization of atoms with electromagnetically induced transparency and collective radiation effects in atomic ensembles.” And the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division awarded Prof. Dan McCammon their Distinguished Career Award “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 future is looking bright for our junior faculty as well, with four of them earning early career awards. Prof. Matthew Otten won an Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award, offered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Prof. Roman Kuzmin won a National Science Foundation CAREER, the Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty. Finally, both Prof. Tiancheng Song and Prof. Vladimir Zhdankin won Department of Energy Early Career awards.

In May, we celebrated spring commencement and our awards banquet, a highlight of our year when we focus on student achievement. We graduated 54 undergraduate students in Spring 2025, a 20% increase from last year. Our major has also grown dramatically in the past five years. We ended the Spring semester with 219 declared majors, a 30% increase from a year ago and a 56% increase from three years ago, so we anticipate graduating many more Badger physicists in the short term. At our awards banquet, we recognized 21 graduate and undergraduate students for their academic, research, and teaching excellence with departmental awards, all made possible through the generosity of our alumni and supporters.

We welcomed another near-record-setting incoming PhD class of 44 students, and given the quality of students we continue to attract, this should be a good trend. However, because of budget uncertainties, central campus has asked all instructional units to take at least a 5% budget cut and L&S imposed a final cut of 7% to our budget. We are also been mandated to reduce our TA budge reduce (despite growth in enrollment). We also must plan other budget saving mechanisms to reach our budget goals; unfortunately, these measures mean not replacing staff and faculty when they leave or retire.

Federal funding at this time remains our primary means of research support, though recently we have seen some grants that we expected to be approved were instead rejected or reduced due to pressures on the federal budget. We all await the successful completion of the federal budget cycle with much anticipation.

Given these uncertainties, we plan to admit our smallest PhD class in recent history to matriculate in Fall 2026. Our department is committed to supporting all of our current 221 PhD students through to their defense. Accordingly, we have designated our Physics Alumni Graduate Fund as our priority fund this year.

We must remain nimble, creative, and resilient even in these difficult times to preserve our primary mission of teaching and research.

On, Wisconsin!
Kevin Black, Department Chair and Professor of Physics