Wright has been a pioneer optical and near-infrared SETI instrument development and research throughout her career. Some of Wright's contributions include leading and collaborating on the design, construction, and implementation of pulsed laser SETI instruments. Wright was a critical team member that developed one of the most advanced optical SETI experiments and was the Principal Investigator of the first near-infrared SETI instrument (NIROSETI) and survey. Wright is currently the Principal Investigator of an all-sky, all-the-time panoramic SETI observatory called ‘PANOSETI.’ Congratulations Shelley! Read More

Professor Keres is among the world’s most influential researchers in their fields according to the 2021 Clarivate listing of Most Highly Cited Researchers in the World.

Clarivate’s 2021 list identifies some 6,600 researchers from across the globe who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Read More

Megan Grace Li is a 2021 Universities Space Research Association Distinguished Undergraduate. She will graduate UCSD this Winter with a B.S. in Physics with a Specialization in Astrophysics. At UCSD, she researches the morphology of nearby galaxies under Dr. Karin Sandstrom.

Megan also does exoplanet research with Breakthrough Listen at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. In May of 2020, Megan founded Big Sister STEM (link here), a nonprofit organization that provides cost-free virtual STEM mentorship to girls in middle school and high school.

She also serves as the President of UCSD's Astronomy Club, Outreach Chair of the Society of Physics Students at UCSD, and Vice President of the UCSD Tea Club.

Graduate student Yu-Hsuan “Eltha” Teng was awarded a prestigious scholarship from the government of Taiwan. It is called the "Government Scholarship to Study Abroad" (GSSA) and is an honor given to a small number of Taiwanese students pursuing a PhD degree outside of Taiwan. The scholarship comes from the Ministry of Education of Taiwan.

This instrument will observe gammas from electromagnetic decays of (relatively!) fresh nucleosynthesis products from explosive astrophysical environments as well as gammas from positron annihilation and other sources. As such it will be in a position to constrain ideas on the synthesis of the elements and chemical and Galactic evolution. The instrument can also give a handle on the production of positrons in the Galaxy. These capabilities put COSI at the heart of the multi-messenger astrophysics enterprise. Its observations may provide insight into the origin of the r-process in compact object-based sources, the nature of dark matter, primordial black holes, and the possible effects of these if captured by neutron stars. See the NASA website announcement - Read More

Dr Sean Casey has been appointed as the General Project Manager of the Simons Array working with Professors Brian Keating and Kam Arnold in CASS effective July 16th. Dr. Casey’s activities include the deployment, optimization, operations, data processing, and infrastructure at the 5200 meter elevation Simons Array site in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. Welcome aboard, Dr Casey!

We congratulate Professor Quinn Konopacky on receiving a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award! The following link gives a write-up on this award and on the other UCSD Physical Sciences faculty NSF Career Award recipients. Read More

Graduate student Christian Aganze has been awarded the Beth Brown Memorial Award, recognizing his contribution to the 2020 National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) conference, “Searching for Distant Ultracool Dwarfs in Deep HST/WFC3 Surveys”, as the Best Graduate Student Poster Presentation. Read More

Prof. Adam Burgasser was elected to be the next Vice-President of the American Astronomical Society. As one of three VPs elected on overlapping 3-year terms, Burgasser will be responsible for organizing AAS national conferences and serves on the AAS Board of Trustees. Read More

The Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS), established in 2016 as the first NSF “Hub”, has now become a full NSF Physics Frontier Center (PFC). The NSF PFC award was made effective September 1, 2020.

Headquartered at UC Berkeley, with Wick Haxton as the the overall PI, the new PFC has co-Investigators from several other institutions including: Andre DeGouvea, Northwestern University; Sanjay Reddy, University of Washington; Gail McLaughlin, North Carolina State University; Baha Balantekin, University of Wisconsin Madison; and George Fuller and Tongyan Lin from UC San Diego.

The primary research foci of the N3AS will be on neutrino physics and astrophysics, the origin of the elements, the physics of dense and ultra-dense matter, compact object and early universe physics, gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics, astrophysical simulation and high performance computing, and the nature of dark matter.

The original N3AS Hub had contributions over three years of $2.4M from NSF and $575,000 from the Heising-Simons Foundation. The commitment from NSF for the new PFC will be $10.9M over five years. The N3AS, currently with 8 postdoctoral fellows, will seek to hire 4 fellows per year to conduct research for 3 years. Fellows will spend the first two years at any of the N3AS institutions of their choosing. They will move to a different N3AS institution for year 3. In practice, the fellows collaborate across these institutions, with adequate funding for (in better times) travel. The N3AS website: Read More

Chris Theissen is among five recipients of the 2020-21 Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar. This award recognizes the well-rounded postdoctoral scholar who not only excels in research and advances the frontiers of science, but also provides leadership, mentorship, and service. Congratulations Chris!

Prof. Adam Burgasser and graduate student Roman Gerasimov have contributed to the discovery and analysis of two ancient brown dwarfs that have heavy element abundances 10-100 times less than the Sun, first identified by a team of citizen scientists. Read More

Prof. Karin Sandstrom has been selected to receive an Outstanding Mentor Award Karin was nominated by students and selected from a competitive group of faculty from the entire campus. Congratulations Karin!

Astronomers have spotted a massive disk galaxy, not unlike our own, that formed 12.5 billion years ago when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only a tenth of its current age. But according to what scientists know about galaxy formation, this one has no business being in the distant universe.

This discovery is challenging how astronomers think about galaxy formation in the early universe.

It's known as Galaxy DLA0817g, but astronomers nicknamed it the Wolfe Disk after late astronomer Arthur M. Wolfe. Read More

Sad news. Margaret Burbidge has passed away. She was 100 years old. A towering figure in the development of modern physics and astronomy, she was also instrumental in founding and guiding UCSD’s efforts in those fields. Margaret and her late husband Geoffrey Burbidge were founding faculty of the UCSD Physics Department. Here is the UCSD News article. For the New York Times article: Read More

Luke Johns is among the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program 2020 Fellows. He has been named an Einstein Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. His proposal title was Oscillating Neutrinos in Core-collapse Supernovae. As an Einstein Fellow, Luke will seek to understand how neutrino flavor evolves in core-collapse supernovae and neutron-star mergers. Congratulations, Luke! Read More

Graduate student Chih-chun "Dino" Hsu has been awarded a Friends of the International Center Fellowship. This fellowship is awarded to graduate students and medical students that “in some way promote international friendship, understanding, and cooperation in a meaningful way.” Both international scholars and scholars conducting international research with international ties are eligible to apply. Dino was one of 30 applicants selected for this award across UCSD campus. Read More

Astronomers working on “first light” data from a newly commissioned telescope in Chile made a chance discovery that led to the identification of a rare eclipse of two brown dwarfs. The result published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. Professor Adam Burgasser is co-author on the paper. Read More

A team of astronomers led by UC San Diego physicist Shelley Wright is deploying a pair of telescopes that will constantly search the nighttime sky for signals from intelligent life in our galaxy. Read More

CASS' very own E. Margaret Burbidge has been named the Inaugural Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Please see the link below. Professor Burbidge is a towering figure in the development of modern astronomy and astrophysics. Her pioneering research in nucleosynthesis, relativistic astrophysics and QSOs/AGN, and novel use of instrumentation has been highly influential. "I know that in many ways her early work brought about the current synergistic relationship between observational astronomy and frontline nuclear and particle physics. Margaret’s scientific accomplishments have served as an inspiration to generations of young astronomers and physicists. As the AAS write-up explains, Margaret also 'broke the observatory gender boundary in the mid-20th century', and this has had very significant positive impact for women in astronomy and physics. We are very fortunate to have her and her legacy in CASS/UCSD," said Prof. George Fuller, CASS Director. Read More

With nearly $1 million in new funding from the foundation, Professor Quinn Konopacky is leading an effort to upgrade the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a high-contrast imaging system for directly detecting and studying Jupiter-like planets. The upgrades will transform GPI into an enhanced imaging system for the new decade. Read More

Ax Center for Experimental Cosmology (ACEC) opened a new lab space called the High Bay Physics Laboratory to integrate and test cryogenic receivers for the Simons Observatory’s small aperture telescopes, known as SATs. Read More

In a paper on “The Origin of Cosmic Rays” just published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement, Richard Lingenfelter shows how the elemental composition of these relativistic nuclei solves the century old puzzle of the sources and processes of their generation. Studies of their plasma properties have long shown that supernova shocks were their most likely sources, but not what produced their unique mix, nor how their ions are injected into these accelerating shocks. Recent combined abundance measurements and calculations now probe their nuclear, atomic and even solid state processes that answer those questions. They reveal that the cosmic ray mass mixing ratio of supernova ejecta and interstellar medium swept up by these shocks directly define the peak acceleration time. Moreover, in that mix fast grain sputtering injection of suprathermal ions preferentially into those accelerating shocks greatly enriches their composition in heavier elements. This at last matches their unique abundance and reveals even more. Read More

Graduate student Chihchun "Dino" Hsu has been the 2019-2020 Carol and George Lattimer Award for Graduate Excellence. The Lattimer Award honors outstanding graduate students in UCSD’s Division of Physical Sciences who seek interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and have a strong commitment to education, mentorship, and service. Read More

Professor Keres is among the world’s most influential researchers in their fields. The Web of Science Group (Clarivate Analytics), which provides insights and analytics on research trends, compiled its 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list of more than 6,000 scientists from around the world whose studies were among the top one percent of most-cited publications in their field over the past 11 years. Read More

Despite their feeble interactions, neutrinos finally go big league and get recognized by UCSD news!
The article highlights the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS), an NSF “Hub”, the first of its kind. UCSD/CASS is one of the the three Hub host institutions, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington being the other two. Check out the N3AS website. For the UCSD News Article: Read More

Prof. Coil and collaborators explore the influence of galactic winds from a distant galaxy called Makani. Here is the Nature article. For the UCSD News article: Read More

Galitzki, a CASS postdoctoral scholar, volunteers for the Fleet Science Center’s popular “Two Scientists Walk into a Bar” events, answering people’s questions about space as best he can. He also helps organize “Astronomy on Tap San Diego,” where researchers give talks and engage with the public at a local brewery. Additionally, he often sets up his own personal telescope at these events and a line instantly forms. He is also a member of the League of Extraordinary Scientists and Engineers, which brings science experiments to local schools. Read More

The first director of CASS, Professor Emeritus Margaret Burbidge turns 100 years old. Check out this video. Read More

The Simons Foundation of New York is giving UC San Diego $20 million to operate the Simons Observatory, a collection of four telescopes that will be placed in Chile’s Atamaca Desert to explore what the universe was like shortly after the Big Bang. The gift increases the foundation’s total support for the observatory project to $80 million, making it among the larger philanthropic gifts of its kind. Read More

Prof. Brian Keating is one of three recipients of the Seventh Annual Excellence in Stewardship award. Prof. Keating demonstrates excellence in stewardship when engaging with our community of supporters.

Exemplary stewardship ensures that our supporters -- donors, volunteers, and corporate and foundation partners -- understand the significance of their involvement with UC San Diego. In addition to expressing gratitude, excellent stewardship cultivates meaningful relationships to advance the university's intellectual, physical, and cultural growth.

The Excellence in Stewardship awards are presented by the Trustees of the UC San Diego Foundation. The honorees will be recognized on June 6th at the annual UC San Diego Foundation Dinner. Congratulations, Prof. Keating! Read More

Heising-Simons Foundation helps boost participation of women scientists as part of new initiative in the Division of Physical Sciences. Read More

Prof. Alison Coil has been selected as a recipient of the 2018/19 Distinguished Teaching Award for Academic Senate Members.

The Distinguished Teaching Award is a prestigious award bestowed upon up to five members of the Academic Senate, three non-Senate faculty members, and three graduate students at UC San Diego each year. The Distinguished Teaching Award was created because UC San Diego faculty recognize the important role excellent teaching plays at the University. This Award is a tangible expression of UC San Diego's commitment to excellence in teaching and to ensuring that this commitment is maintained. The Committee on Distinguished Teaching seeks to select those who exhibit creativity, innovative teaching methods, the ability to motivate students to actively seek out knowledge, and an extraordinary level of teaching commitment. Congratulations, Prof. Coil!

Alison Coil discusses this first image of a black hole with KUSI-TV. Read More

A new CNBC video on SpaceX and Elon Musk examines the company and space travel, and asks questions about the diversity of the SpaceX workforce and whether solving climate change on Earth should be a higher priority than colonizing Mars. Read More

Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance," but today quantum entanglement is poised to revolutionize technology from computers to cryptography. NOVA follows a unique experiment in the Canary Islands to use quasars at opposite ends of the universe to push back alternative explanations for entanglement to the beginning of time. Join us for a screening of the PBS NOVA documentary "Einstein's Quantum Riddle," hosted by UC San Diego's Andrew Friedman, one of the collaborators on the project, followed by a panel discussion. Moderated by UCSD CASS Prof. Brian Keating, associate director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Friedman will be joined by Jason Gallicchio (Professor of Physics, Harvey Mudd College) and David Brin (physicist and Hugo & Nebula-winning author). Monday, March 4 2019, 6-8p, Atkinson Auditorium, UC San Diego. Free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. Read More

Adam Burgasser and Jon Rees contributed to the discovery of a white dwarf with an unusual debris disk orbiting it. The system, LSPM J0207+3331, was originally identified by citizen scientist Melina Thévenot of Germany working through the Backyward Worlds/Planet 9 Project. The discovery was reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters today. Read More

Chris Theissen, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSD, has been awarded both NASA Sagan and NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2019. The Sagan is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in Astronomy, with an oversubscription rate of 16:1. Chris will be conducting his fellowship work with Prof. Quinn Konopacky.

Angela Berti, CASS/Physics Graduate Student, has been selected as a 2019 Bouchet Scholar. Named for the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States (in Physics from Yale University in 1876), the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.

Five UC San Diego Bouchet Scholars were selected from among an outstanding group of nominees — Angela was the only one from Physics — , all of whom demonstrated a commitment to the tenets of the society. The Bouchet Scholars will be invited to attend the annual Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity in Graduate Education April 5-6, 2019 where they will be inducted into the society. Congratulations, Angela!

PBS NOVA is airing a documentary, "Einstein's Quantum Riddle" about the cosmic Bell experiment where CASS Assistant Research Scientist Andrew Friedman and collaborators tested fundamental questions about quantum entanglement with astronomical observations in the Canary Islands (S46 E2). It premiers Wed Jan 9 at 9pm on local PBS stations. Here is a teaser trailer. It is currently streaming for free on the PBS NOVA Website, and for $3 on Amazon Prime. The DVD can also be purchased from Amazon or NOVA. Read More

Professor Coil is among the world’s most influential researchers in their fields. Clarivate Analytics, which provides insights and analytics on research trends, compiled its 2018 Highly Cited Researchers list of more than 6,000 scientists from around the world whose studies were among the top one percent of most-cited publications in their field over the past 10 years. Read More

The cosmic Bell test experiment which used astronomical observations of quasars to help test quantum entanglement was recently featured in an article for Symmetry Magazine and as the cover story for this week's issue of New Scientist Magazine. Read More

Awash in money, UC San Diego enjoys a golden age in research. Read More

Professor Brian Keating’s book, Losing the Nobel Prize, has been selected as one of Amazon’s 20 Best Science Books of 2018. Read More

As a scientist who observes distant galaxies and black holes both far and near, Shelley Wright noticed an important gap in space—right on the grounds of the University of California San Diego. A proponent of teaching and training students through the observation of the night sky, Wright realized that it was time the university featured its own portable planetarium. Read More

The Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled Oct. 30 to support the construction permit of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the telescope would be the biggest and most expensive in the Northern Hemisphere. It would also be one of three huge prospective telescopes that could transform astronomy in the 21st century. UC San Diego astrophysicist Shelley Wright is the Project Scientist for TMT’s first light instrument, IRIS. Read More

CASS Assistant Research Scientist Andrew Friedman's work testing quantum theory using light from distant quasars to choose measurement settings in an entanglement test has been featured as an Editors Suggestion in Physical Review Letters. See press releases from UCSD, MIT, Vienna IQOQI, and Harvey Mudd College. Also see other news coverage from Space.com, Motherboard (Vice), Gizmodo, and Physics World. Read More

Professors Alison Coil and Karin Sandstrom are each a recipient of the 2017 UC San Diego Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award. The awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, March 1, 2018 from 1:30-3:00 pm, in the Price Center West Ballroom. All are welcome to attend.

Alison Coil has been appointed to the newly created position of Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Division of Physical Sciences.

Professor Coil has extensive experience related to equity, diversity, and inclusion issues at UC San Diego. She created and leads the Graduate Women in Physics group, chaired Excellence Through Diversity faculty hires in Physics for four consecutive years, and was an integral force in more than doubling the representation of women faculty in Physics in the last decade. Professor Coil has served on multiple campus-wide efforts related to equity, diversity, and inclusion and was awarded a University-wide Diversity award in 2010. She has served as the Faculty Equity Advisor for the Division of Physical Sciences since 2014, where she has taken an active role in mentoring and advocating for women and underrepresented minority faculty in the division. She currently chairs the Divisional Excellence Committee, related to inclusion in faculty hiring, and co-chairs the Task Force on the Status of Women in the Division of Physical Sciences.

Congratulations, Professor Coil!

Carl Melis, CASS Associate Research Scientist and co-author of the paper says, "the result concerns a nearby, dusty star that has been considered as both being young with possible terrestrial-like planet building ongoing and as old with possible companion disruption. Our work demonstrates the youth of this source through X-ray and optical observations and also the existence of significant quantities of gas orbiting with the dust. We conclude that this young star is likely in the process of consuming a close-orbiting gas-giant planet." Read More

Andy Weir, author of 'The Martian', as part of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination with Prof. Brian Keating and CASS Scientist Andy Freidman. Read More

Latest findings increase understanding of how powerful winds generated by super- massive black holes impact growth of a galaxy. Read More

UC San Diego has begun designing a powerful telescope that will be placed in Chile’s Atacama Desert to search for “ancient light” that could help explain how the universe arose from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
The $10 million telescope will be the largest of five instruments that are being developed as part of the Simons Observatory, which will be located on a high, arid plateau that’s well-suited for searching the cosmos. Read More

On behalf of collaborators at institutions worldwide, the University of California San Diego recently signed a contract for the design and construction of a state-of-the-art millimeter wave telescope for the Simons Observatory. The telescope is the first of several which will be located in the high Atacama Desert of Northern Chile in 2020. Read More

Assistant Professor of Physics Quinn Konopacky has been named a UCSD Hellman Faculty Fellow for 2017-18. The Hellman Fellows Program annually awards funding to recognize faculty who show capacity for great distinction in their research and academic work, and is intended to support activities that will enhance their progress towards tenure. Congratulations, Professor Konopacky! Read More

Jérémy Chastenet has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective October 16th. Dr. Chastenet is under the supervision of Prof. Karin Sandstrom. His research activities include studying the properties of dust in nearby galaxies using observations from the Herschel Space Observatory and the WISE All-Sky survey. Welcome aboard, Dr. Chastenet!

Mikhail Malkov has been elected a 2017 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) by the APS Council of Representatives upon the recommendation of the Division of Plasma Physics (DPP). The number of APS Fellows elected each year is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership. It is a prestigious recognition by their peers of their outstanding contributions to physics. Dr. Malkov is being recognized for his ground-breaking contributions to the theory of charged particle acceleration by collisionless shocks, the theory of nonlinear shock acceleration and injection, and the propagation of accelerated particles; for key contributions to modeling the LH transition. Congratulations Mischa!

The Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for the development of cryo-electron microscopy. The latest technical developments that made the recent breakthrough possible was the introduction of new electron detectors in electron microscopy. Early reports on the use of these sensors for the detection of electrons were presented around the mid-2000s, but these sensors had already been used as a tool in studies of charged particles in other research areas, such as astronomy. This sensor work was pioneered by Dr. Xuong of the UCSD Physics department with the support of CASS engineers Fred Dutweiler and Philippe LeBlanc.

Alexander Lowell has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective November 8th. Dr. Lowell is under the supervision of Prof. Steven Boggs and his research activities will involve Compton Spectrometer and Imager gamma rays. Welcome aboard, Dr. Lowell!

Several CASS astronomers traveled far and wide to view today's special eclipse, which was the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in the United States in 99 years. Read More

Jarred Roberts has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective August 14th. Dr. Roberts is under the supervision of Prof. Steven Boggs and his research activities will involve high-energy physics instrumentation development for experiments like the Compton Spectrometer and Imager Explorer (COSI-X) and the General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS). Welcome aboard, Dr. Roberts!

Adam Burgasser -- first author on paper outlining a new study that the TRAPPIST-1 star is quite old: between 5.4 and 9.8 billion years. This is up to twice as old as our own solar system, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Read More

Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis.

As the late Carl Sagan once put it: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.”

But what about the heavier elements in the periodic chart, elements such as gold, platinum and uranium?

Astronomers believe most of these “r-process elements”—elements much heavier than iron—were created, either in the aftermath of the collapse of massive stars and the associated supernova explosions, or in the merging of binary neutron star systems.

“A different kind of furnace was needed to forge gold, platinum, uranium and most other elements heavier than iron,” explained George Fuller, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics who directs UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. “These elements most likely formed in an environment rich with neutrons.” Read More

Prof. Keres and the FIRE team found that a large fraction of matter in the Milky Way comes from far-flung galaxies. Read More

Sibasish Laha has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective June 1st. Dr. Laha is under the supervision of Dr. Alex Markowitz and his research activities will involve studying how supermassive black holes residing in other galaxies are fueled. He will use observational X-ray data on dozens of gas-accreting black holes to study how matter is transported from the host galaxies. Welcome aboard!

Adam Burgasser was part of an international team which has discovered that one of the closest brown dwarfs to our Sun has the same mass as a giant planet. It's called SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, and is a well-studied brown dwarf only 21 light-years from the Sun in the constellation Pisces. Read More

Adam Burgasser has been awarded a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholarship to conduct astrophysical research in the United Kingdom. The Fulbright Program, initiated by Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946 and managed by the US Department of State, aims to increase mutual understanding and support of friendly and peaceful relations between people of the US and the people of other countries by awarding exchange grants to US and foreign researchers in over 155 countries. Over 370,000 Fulbright Awards have been awarded since the programs inception, and many have gone on to win Nobel Prizes and become leaders and innovators in scientific research. Adam will be in residence at the University of Exeter investigating cloud formation in the atmospheres of the coolest stars, brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets.

New CASS Assistant Research Scientist Andrew Friedman's work on cosmic tests of fundamental quantum mechanics has been featured as an Editors Suggestion in PRL, and is written up in Forbes, New Scientist, Quanta, and The Atlantic magazines. Here are the articles in Forbes, Quanta, and The Atlantic. For the PRL release: Read More

Andrew Friedman has been appointed as an Assistant Research Scientist in CASS, effective March 1st. Welcome aboard!

Mojegan Azadi and Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi have been selected to be members of the UC San Diego Chapter of the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society for 2017. Their nominations demonstrate their exemplification of the characteristics of Edward A. Bouchet: Character, Leadership, Advocacy, Service, and Scholarly Achievement. Congratulations! Read More

Adam Burgasser is part of an international team that discovered a record-setting seven-planet system around a very low-mass, low-temperature star called TRAPPIST-1. All seven planets are roughly Earth-sized, and three reside in the star's habitable zone. Read More

Congratulations to Quinn Konopacky, Assistant Professor of Physics, for being nominated to receive a 2016 UCSD Diversity Award!

The annual Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards Program honors staff, faculty, students, departments, and organizational units or groups that make outstanding contributions in the areas of equal opportunity, affirmative action, diversity, and the UCSD Principles of Community during the year.

Raphael Flauger has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics and is a member of CASS. Welcome aboard, Prof. Flauger!

Graduate student Lucas Johns has been selected by the Division of Physical Sciences as the recipient in the Department of Physics of the 2017 Inamori Fellowship. The intent of the Inamori Fellowship Program is to support our best and brightest current graduate students who will ensure the future of humanity through the balance of the scientific process and the human spirit. This investment in our students is parallel to the Inamori Foundation's commitment to the Kyoto Prize that is given annually to those who have made significant contributions to the progress of science, the development of civilization, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit. Congratulations, Luke!

Physics graduate student Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi won the award for an outstanding oral presentation at the 2016 SACNAS The National Diversity in STEM Conference in Long Beach, CA. Congratulations, Daniella!

Professor Brian Keating has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. The number of APS Fellows elected each year is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership. It is a prestigious recognition by peers of their outstanding contributions to physics.

The citation that will appear on Keating's fellowship certificate is: "For his role in designing the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) experiment to search for the unique cosmic microwave background polarization pattern predicted by models of inflationary cosmology, and his founding of the POLARBEAR experiment, which produced the first measurements of both the B-mode power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, and the detection of the gravitational lensing detection power spectrum from the cosmic microwave background's polarization." Congratulations, Professor Keating!

Dr. Jerome Maire has been appointed in CASS as an Assistant Project Scientist effective October 1st. Prior to coming to UCSD, Dr. Maire held a prestigious Dunlap Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto. Welcome, Dr. Maire!

Dr. Nicholas Galitzki has been appointed in CASS as a Postdoctoral Scholar effective September 1st. He will be conducting research with PI Brian Keating primarily on the CMB including deployments to field the Simons Array in Chile. Dr. Galitzki comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his PhD. Welcome aboard, Dr. Galitzki!

Mark Thiemens, a former dean and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, has won the most prestigious prize awarded in the field of meteoritics —the scientific discipline concerned with the study of solar system origin, evolution and history. Read More

Hsiu-Shan Yu has been appointed as an Assistant Research Scientist in CASS effective August 1st. She was formerly a postdoc scholar in CASS. Congratulations, Dr. Yu!

Renowned astronomer Margaret Burbidge has decided to house her personal papers at UC San Diego, where she has been on the faculty for more than a half century.

The papers will be stored in the university's Mandeville Special Collections Library, which already holds the papers of her late husband, astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge. Read More

Kam Arnold has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics and is a member of CASS. Prior to this appointment, he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor of Physics. Welcome aboard, Prof. Arnold!

Debby Tran, an undergraduate research student for Quinn Konopacky, won a Chambliss Student Poster Award at this month's 228th American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting in San Diego. Congratulations, Debby! Read More

Assistant Professor of Physics Shelley Wright has been named a UCSD Hellman Faculty Fellow for 2016-17. The Hellman Fellows Program annually awards funding to recognize faculty who show capacity for great distinction in their research and academic work, and is intended to support activities that will enhance their progress towards tenure. Congratulations, Professor Wright! Read More

CASS Research Scientist Carl Melis and a group of researchers using the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a planet-like body that may have been encrusted in limestone and is having its surface layers devoured by its deceased host star. Read More

Professor Alison Coil is a featured faculty speaker included in the faculty discussion series at the UC San Diego & You event on campus June 2nd for Alumni Weekend. Join campus leadership and fellow Tritons to hear from her and other distinguished faculty who will share their passion projects and groundbreaking, brilliant work. Read More

UCSD has received $40 million in gifts to create and lead an observatory in Chile that’s expected to greatly improve scientists’ ability to study how the universe evolved after its calamitous birth 13.8 billion years ago. “The generosity of this award is unprecedented in our field, and will enable a major leap in scientific capability,” said Brian Keating, Professor of Physics at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the current project director. “We have this beautiful edifice of everything that’s happened in the universe and the laws of physics since about a second after the Big Bang. But we want to go back orders of magnitude—perhaps as many as 30 orders of magnitude farther back in time or higher in temperature. We’re trying to understand the nature of matter and energy and understand the first moments of the universe, potentially what brought it into existence.” Here is the Union-Tribune press release, and the story in Nature. For the UCSD News story: Read More

An international team of astronomers, including UC San Diego’s Professor Adam Burgasser and graduate student Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi, has reported in Nature the discovery of three Earth-sized planets orbiting near the “habitable zone” of an ultracool dwarf star named TRAPPIST-1, 40 light years in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. These are the first terrestrial planets to be discovered around such a tiny and dim star, and opens a new avenue in the search for life beyond Earth. The planets were found via the transit method, in which a planet passing between us and its host star blocks a small portion of the starlight, producing a subtle but periodic dimming pattern. Multiple transits for this star were detected with the TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescope, and their timings indicate the presence of three planets with orbit periods between 1.5 days and 73 days. These short orbits are likely to be in or around the habitable zone of the star, a zone in which liquid water could potentially exist on the planets’ surfaces. Evidence that this is the case will have to wait until the 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will have the capability of measuring the chemical composition of these planets’ atmospheres. Also the ESO press release can be found here, USA Today story here, The Atlantic story here, National Geographic story here, and a conversation piece here. For the UCSD press release: Read More

Professor Alison Coil served as the scientific consultant for a play at the Old Globe, called Constellations. She also headed up a post-show Q+A with the audience on April 16th called “Subject Matters".

The play takes place in a multiverse, based on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the lead character is a female astrophysicist. The audience sees the same two people play out their relationship in different parallel universes in which they make different decisions.

Coil met with the director, Rick Seer, to discuss the science behind the play and talked about how to stage it and convey the multiverse idea to the audience. She met with the two actors to answer their questions about the science and the characters. She also advised the scenic designer to create a hexagonal set that referenced the male character, a beekeeper, and because of the hexagonal mirrors used at the Keck Telescopes. Read More

Professor Brian Keating is part of a team of scientists trying to view and analyze the light emitted in the instant after the Big Bang – light that “has traveled since essentially the beginning of time to reach us.” The work of Keating and his colleagues might, among other things, help prove or disprove the existence of multiple universes. Their research has implications beyond the field of science. Read More

Congratulations to Yusuke Kosuga (PhD 2012) for winning the 10th Young Scientist Award of the Physical Society of Japan (Division 2, Plasma Physics). Kosuga, who is currently Assistant Professor in The Institute for Advanced Study and Research Institute of Applied Mechanics of Kyushu University, was cited for: 'Research on plasma turbulence and transport with statistical fluctuation in real and velocity space'.

Work done at UCSD, the WCI Center for Fusion Theory (RoK), and Kyushu University was listed in the full citation. At UCSD, Kosuga was a member of the Diamond group in CASS and Physics. The full announcement in English can be found here, and in Japanese and English here. Read More

Professor Adam Burgasser has been selected by the Committee on Senate Awards as a recipient of the 2015/16 Distinguished Teaching Award for Academic Senate Members.

The Distinguished Teaching Award is a prestigious award bestowed upon up to five members of the Academic Senate, three non-Senate faculty members, and three graduate students at UC San Diego each year. The Distinguished Teaching Award was created because UC San Diego faculty recognize the important role excellent teaching plays at the University. This award is a tangible expression of UC San Diego's commitment to excellence in teaching and to ensuring that this commitment is maintained. The Committee on Distinguished Teaching seeks to select those who exhibit creativity, innovative teaching methods, the ability to motivate students to actively seek out knowledge, and an extraordinary level of teaching commitment. Congratulations, Professor Burgasser!

Dr. Eric Michelsen has been selected by the Committee on Senate Awards as a recipient of the 2015/16 Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award for Non-Senate Members.

The Distinguished Teaching Award is a prestigious award bestowed upon up to five members of the Academic Senate, three non-Senate faculty members, and three graduate students at UC San Diego each year. The Distinguished Teaching Award was created because UC San Diego faculty recognize the important role excellent teaching plays at the University. This award is a tangible expression of UC San Diego's commitment to excellence in teaching and to ensuring that this commitment is maintained. The Committee on Distinguished Teaching seeks to select those who exhibit creativity, innovative teaching methods, the ability to motivate students to actively seek out knowledge, and an extraordinary level of teaching commitment.

In 1999-2000, the establishment of an endowment in memory of Professor Paul D. Saltman extended the Distinguished Teaching Awards to non-Senate faculty members and graduate students who meet the award criteria and who also exhibit other qualities that emulate Professor Saltman's passion for teaching and learning. Kudos, Dr. M.!

Detectors developed for UCSD’s POLARBEAR-2 and Simons Array experiments are featured in this article in the IEEE Spectrum magazine. These antennas were invented in the 1980s to solve important problems in microwave polarimetry and were later perfected for use in Cosmology experiments such as POLARBEAR-2 and the Simons Array by CASS Professor Gabriel Rebeiz. These novel sensors will be deployed in 2017 to search for primordial gravitational waves from the Inflationary cosmological epoch which, if convincingly detected, would provide the strongest evidence for quantum gravity — a goal long sought after by physicists. Read More

Dr. Zhibin Guo has been appointed in CASS as a Postdoctoral Scholar effective March 16th. He will be conducting research with PI Professor Pat Diamond primarily on models of synchronization of modes by toroidal coupling, and the destruction of synchronization by shear flows. Dr. Guo comes to us from Seoul National University where he was a Postdoctoral Researcher. Congratulations on your new appointment, Dr. Guo!

The Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) has named Professor Dusan Keres as a 2016 Cottrell Scholar. He is part of a very select group of 24 early career academic scientists nationwide to receive this distinction. Congratulations, Professor Keres! Read More

Gabriel Rebeiz, Wireless Communications Industry Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCSD and CASS affiliate, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his work on reconfigurable radios/RF MEMS and phased-array technologies. Read More

Assistant Professor of Physics Karin Sandstrom’s work on space dust is featured in the first of a video series produced by the Division of Physical Sciences, using computer animation to show science on scales too big and too small to see. Professor Sandstrom studies the interstellar medium - the dust and gas in galaxies and between stars, and especially how ultraviolet light interacts with soot-like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. That, she says, is key to everything - how stars (and planets) form, how galaxies evolve, and perhaps how life emerged. Read More

These recent assistant professors of physics hires in the Department of Physics and CASS are giving humanity a view of the universe as it’s never been seen before. Read More

At a time when women remain underrepresented in the sciences and a student can still complete a physics degree without taking a class in her major led by a female professor, UC San Diego welcomed nearly 200 students to a conference for undergraduate women in physics this past weekend. Read More

Nathan Stebor has been appointed as an Assistant Project Scientist in CASS, effective January 1st. He was formerly a CASS Postdoctoral Scholar. Congratulations, Dr. Stebor!

The intent of the Inamori Fellowship Program is to support our best and brightest current graduate students who will ensure the future of humanity through the balance of the scientific process and the human spirit. This investment in our students is parallel to the Inamori Foundation's commitment to the Kyoto Prize that is given annually to those who have made significant contributions to the progress of science, the development of civilization, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit. Congratulations to David! Read More

Brooke Simmons has been appointed as an Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in CASS effective December 1, 2015. Dr. Simmons studies accreting supermassive black holes in galaxies without a detectable stellar bulge. This work has implications for black hole scaling relationships and galaxy-black hole co-evolution. She earned her PhD in Astronomy from Yale University and completed a postdoctoral researcher position at the University of Oxford prior to coming to UCSD. Welcome to CASS, Dr. Simmons!

It's a tough time to be a B-mode.

B-modes rocketed to fame in March 2014, when a team of scientists working on an experiment called BICEP2 announced the first direct evidence for primordial gravitational waves rippling out from the earliest moments of the universe: a distinctive imprint in the cosmic microwave background (the light left over from the Big Bang) called "B-mode polarization," or B-modes for short. Polarization describes the way that light-waves are oriented, and B-mode waves are twisted into a swirling pattern. The detection of these swirls was a stunning confirmation of the theory of cosmic inflation. Suddenly, B-modes were electromagnetic celebrities. PBS story: Read More

We are pleased to announce that Robert Reasenberg has accepted an appointment in CASS as a Research Scientist, effective October 1, 2015. Dr. Reasenberg is from Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Welcome to CASS, Dr. Reasenberg!

In the new issue of journal Nature, a team of scientists including Dusan Keres, Assistant Professor of Physics, presents a new supercomputer simulation that can help explain the origin of some of the most extreme objects in the universe, bright submillimeter galaxies. These objects can form stars with rates up to 1000 times faster than our own Galaxy. Read more in the UCSD press release, an article in LA Times or the paper and related News & Views in Nature. Read More

Cliff Johnson has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective September 21, 2015. Dr. Johnson works in Assistant Professor of Physics Karin Sandstrom's group on multiwavelength observational studies of the interstellar medium and stellar populations in nearby galaxies. He earned his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington. Welcome to CASS, Dr. Johnson!

Assistant Professor of Physics Quinn Konopacky with a team of other astronomers used the Gemini Planet Imager to detect an exoplanet, called 51 Eri b, which is like a young Jupiter, a gas giant about twice Jupiter's mass but hotter and even younger than its star. The newly discovered planet orbits 51 Eridani, a nearby star a lot like our own, though brighter and much younger, just 20 million years old. UCSD News story, and U-T story: Read More

Grant Teply has been appointed to CASS as a Postdoctoral Scholar effective August 1, 2015. Dr. Teply works in Professor of Physics Brian Keating's observational cosmology group on the POLARBEAR telescope project. He earned his PhD in Physics from Caltech. Welcome to CASS, Dr. Teply!

Dr. Regina Jorgenson will join the staff of the Maria Mitchell Association (MMA) as the new Director of Astronomy on January 4, 2016. Dr. Jorgenson earned her Ph.D. in physics at UCSD, specializing in studies of galaxy formation and evolution. She worked in CASS under the tutelage of the late Professor Arthur Wolfe. Read More

Professor of Physics Brian Keating will be part of a panel discussion on "The Physics of Free Will", on Thursday, August 6th at 6:00 pm at Atkinson Auditorium, first floor of Qualcomm Institute/Calit2. The event is sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and is free and open to the public. RSVP required. Read More

Professor of Physics Brian Keating's group is part of an international team of cosmologists manning the POLARBEAR Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, in hopes it will illuminate the conditions of the universe just after its dawn 13.8 billion years ago. Read More

Karin Sandstrom has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics at UCSD effective July 1, 2015. Professor Sandstrom's main interest of research is in the interstellar medium: the gas and dust between the stars in a galaxy. In particular, she is interested in the properties of interstellar dust - how dust properties evolve over time, vary within and among galaxies, and how they influence the physics of the interstellar medium. Please welcome Professor Sandstrom to CASS!

Professor of Physics Brian Keating and CASS Associate Research Scientist Kam Arnold received a $5,000,000 NSF Award for the Simons Array Experiment. Both are Co-I's on the project. The title of their project is "POLARBEAR/Simons Array: High-fidelity maps of CMB polarization to study large-scale structure, measure neutrino masses, and search for the signature of inflation." Congratulations! Read More

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the Government of Canada's intention to provide significant support for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), an international project that will build one of the world's largest and most advanced astronomical observatories in Hawaii. One news story. Read More

Alexey Vlasenko has been appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in CASS effective March 20, 2015. Dr. Vlasenko works in George Fuller's group on neutrino astrophysics. He earned his PhD in Physics from UCSD. Congratulations, Dr. Vlasenko!

Astronomers have expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light. Shelley Wright, Assistant Professor of Physics, led the development of a new instrument called NIROSETI for near-infrared optical SETI, which has been installed at UC's Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. The new instrument has just begun to scour the sky for messages from other worlds. Read More

Associate Professor of Physics Brian Keating discusses CMB photons, "massless messengers", in this Nature article. Read More

Congratulations to Brian Keating, Associate Professor of Physics, and Mike Norman, Professor of Physics and Director of SDSC, for being nominated by Suresh Subramani, Executive Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, to receive a 2014 UCSD Diversity Award!

The annual Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards Program honors staff, faculty, students, departments, and organizational units or groups that make outstanding contributions in the areas of equal opportunity, affirmative action, diversity, and the UCSD Principles of Community during the year. Read More

Associate Professor of Physics Brian Keating and CASS Postdoctoral Scholar Jon Kaufman, along with Brad Johnson, Professor of Physics at Columbia, have been awarded a 2014 Buchalter Cosmology Prize for a paper proposing a way to significantly enhance cosmological measurements in a manner that should enable sensitive test of ideas fundamental to our understanding of physical laws. Their paper was posted to the online repository arXiv in September 2014, http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1409.8242 (link to paper). Congratulations! Read More

Quinn Konopacky has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics at UCSD effective January 1, 2015. Professor Konopacky's research focuses on planet formation and evolution, high contrast imaging, star formation, stellar and substellar evolution, orbital dynamics, high angular resolution imaging and spectroscopy, adaptive optics, astrometry, speckle interferometry, optical and infrared astronomy. Please welcome Professor Konopacky to CASS!

Shelley Wright has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Physics at UCSD effective January 1, 2015. Her research encompasses experimental and observational astrophysics, optical and infrared instrumentation, adaptive optics, galaxy formation and evolution, and SETI. Please welcome Professor Wright to CASS!