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Baha Balantekin, Eugene P. Wigner Professor of Physics, was elected a member of the Science Academy of Turkey. The Science Academy of Turkey is an independent (non-governmental), self-governing organization dedicated to promoting scientific merit, freedom and integrity. The Science Academy endorses the time-honored traditions of integrity, independence and social engagement and strives to contribute to the improvement of science education and the public perception of research and scholarship. Besides Balantekin, the newly elected members of the Science Academy include Nobelists Phil Anderson and Peter Diamond.

Using $2.4 million in stimulus funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the structure will be used to study the origin of magnetic fields in the universe and explore the self-generation of magnetic fields in a plasma dynamo as a potential energy source.

Carlos completed his Ph.D. in Physics in 2012 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was advised by Dr. Cary Forest with theory support from Dr. Chris Hegna. He was awarded the 2013 Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, "for experimental research that conclusively demonstrated effective stabilization of the deleterious resistive wall mode in a linear plasma column by rotating conducting shells, and for perceiving how error fields affect kink mode stability asymmetrically for differentially rotating walls."

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider". The University of Wisconsin groups of Professors Sau Lan Wu (ATLAS) and Duncan Carlsmith, Sridhara Dasu, Matt Herndon and Wesley Smith (CMS) played key roles in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Efforts are underway to understand details of the Higgs Mechanism, which is deemed responsible for providing masses for all fundamental particles. FYI: A public lecture on the Discovery of the Higgs will be given by Prof. Wesley Smith at the Physical Sciences Laboratory, Stoughton, on Thursday. The physics department colloquium this Friday will be given by Prof. Sridhara Dasu on "Understanding the Higgs Boson".