UW alum Angela Laird was named Woman Physicist of the Month for November, 2015 by the American Physical Society. Dr. Angela Laird is an Associate Professor of Physics at Florida International University and the director of FIU’s Neuroinformatics and Brain Connectivity Laboratory. She was recently identified on the Thompson Reuters’ list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2014,” and she ranks among the top 1 percent most cited for the field of neuroscience and behavior between 2002 and 2012.  Laird received her Ph.D. in Physics/Medical Physics from the UW in 2002.

Other UW Physics people who have been recognized include

January 2015 – Marjorie Corcoran (Post Doc 1977-79)
June 2013 – Reina Maruyama (former faculty)
February 2013 – Laura Reina (Scientist 97-98)
December 2012 – Jodi Cooley (UW Ph.D. 2003)

Some of America’s greatest innovations have come from garages, or basements. The makerspace called Garage Physics at UW-Madison is both.

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Duncan Carlsmith (left) discusses an advanced search engine with Josh Cherek, the student who developed it, at the Garage Physics makerspace. The twin copper pipes in the foreground replicate an 1851 experiment that Albert Einstein cited as one foundation for his special theory of relativity.

Photo: David Tenenbaum

UW News Story

The Balzan Prizewinners 2015 were announced today in Milan by the Chairman of the Balzan General Prize Committee, Salvatore Veca, together with the President of the Balzan Prize Foundation, Enrico Decleva, at the Corriere della Sera Foundation. Francis Halzen was awarded the prestigious prize “for his unparalleled accomplishments which have led to the construction of the large IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the south polar ice, a facility that has opened up a new window into the Universe through the study of cosmological high-energy neutrinos.”

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Sorting through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year, researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have gathered powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos.

         The new observations are important because they herald a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, nearly massless high energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies. In the new study, the detection of 21 ultra high-energy muons – secondary particles created on the very rare occasions when neutrinos interact with other particles – from the mass of particles coursing upward through the IceCube detector provides independent confirmation of astrophysical neutrinos from our galaxy as well as cosmic neutrinos from sources outside the Milky Way.

The results are published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Garage Physics and Venturewell offer a program of support for UW-Madison entrepreneurial teams to conduct R&D and to participate in local and national business plan competitions.

Garage Physics is a makerspace in Sterling Hall for innovative student-focused research, education, and entrepreneurship. Venturewell (formerly National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, NCIIA) is a national organization supporting student entrepreneurship.

For additional information and to apply, visit the website.

Garage Physics Website