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The Women's Center presents awards in three categories each year: the Margaret Cuninggim Women's Center Leadership Award, the Mentoring Award and the Mary Jane Werthan Award. This spring, the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center named five people from the... Read More

The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the appointment of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships to a distinguished and diverse group of culture creators working across 52 disciplines. Jefferson Cowie, the James G. Stahlma... Read More

The distinguished faculty members and deans representing eight colleges and schools were presented with medallions that symbolize the attainment of their positions and will become part of their official academic regalia. Chair holders contribute their ... Read More

Al-Marayati and Samar Ali, Unity Project co-chair, will explore the shared experiences of Muslim and Arab Americans and the ongoing crisis in Gaza in a timely and insightful conversation at noon on Monday, April 22, at the John Seigenthaler Center. Thi... Read More

Julian Sonner, University of Geneva The chaotic inner workings of quantum black holes Black holes are an experimental fact of life, one of the simplest and most robust consequences of our classical understanding of the gravitational force. Yet, they are among the most extreme and mysterious objects known to science. Read More

Jesse Spencer-Smith, Vanderbilt University Science and the Frontier of AI In the past 18 months, the structures of nearly all known proteins (over 200 million) were predicted by an AI technology, Alphafold, completely reshaping protein structure research. 2.2 million possible new materials were predicted by an AI tool, GNoME. And… Read More

Jenny Greene, Princeton University Stumbling over (red) accreting black holes with JWST The first year of operations of the James Webb Space Telescope has been incredibly exciting in many respects, but one field experiencing new vigor is the search for the highest redshift accreting black holes. I will discuss the… Read More

Matt Strassler, Harvard University Exploring The Foundations of our Quantum Cosmos. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 marked a major milestone in our understanding of the universe, and a watershed for particle physics as a discipline. What’s known about particles and fields now forms a nearly complete short… Read More

Paul Romatschke, University of Colorado Boulder Life on an Endless Hill: Making Sense of Up-Side-Down Potentials in Quantum Mechanics and High Energy Physics In classical physics, unbounded (or “up-side-down”) potentials do not allow for a stable ground state. As a consequence, unbounded potentials have often been dismissed as not viable… Read More

Christine Aidala, University of Michigan Spin-Momentum Correlations, Aharonov-Bohm, and Color Entanglement in Quantum Chromodynamics After the development of QCD in the last quarter of the 20th century, we are now in an exciting new era in which much more quantitative QCD calculations can be tested against increasingly sophisticated experimental measurements. Read More

Dale Kocevski, Colby College Insights into Early SMBH Growth from JWST. The capabilities of JWST are now allowing us to measure the host demographics of AGN beyond cosmic noon and detect lower luminosity quasars out to the epoch of reionization. I will discuss recent AGN-related results from the CEERS Survey… Read More

Jess McIver, The University of British Columbia New discoveries with gravitational-wave astrophysics. In the last six years, the field of gravitational wave astrophysics has grown from a groundbreaking first discovery to revealing new populations of black holes and neutron stars through distant cosmic collisions, which has provided new insights into… Read More

Pavel Kovtun, University of Victoria Extreme fluids: From field theory to hydrodynamics and back. Hydrodynamics is a well-established field with a venerable history. In this talk, I will focus on foundational aspects of hydrodynamics which are relevant to describing matter in the extreme conditions of high temperatures and high densities. Read More

Clifford M. Will, University of Florida The Renaissance of General Relativity Einstein completed his monumental theory of General Relativity in 1915, and four years later became an international science superstar when astronomers announced that the Sun’s gravity bent light rays in agreement with his theory. Yet within a decade, interest… Read More

Bharat Ratra, Kansas State University Spatial Curvature, Dark Energy Dynamics, Neither, or Both Observations over the two last decades have persuaded cosmologists that (as yet only indirectly detected) dark energy is by far the main component of the energy budget of the current universe. I review a few simple dark… Read More

Smadar Naoz, University of California, Los Angeles It’s Raining Black Holes…Hallelujah! Gravitational wave (GW) emissions from extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are promising sources for low-frequency GW detectors. EMRIs are the result of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) that captures a stellar-mass compact object, such as BH. The channel often considered in… Read More

Kelly Chipps, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Nuclear Astrophysics in the Next Decade: Understanding the R Process We are now in the era of multimessenger astronomy: a coherent combination of myriad observations, ranging from isotopic analysis of stardust, to visible, infrared, and x-ray all-sky surveys, to gravitational wave signatures. Combined with… Read More

Sokrates T. Pantelides, Vanderbilt University A journey on the nanoscale with a combination of theory and microscopy Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 Density-functional-theory-based calculations using high-performance computers have made enormous strides in describing the atomic-scale properties of complex… Read More

Peter Steinberg, Brookhaven National Laboratory Collisions with light at the LHC: photon-photon and photonuclear physics with ATLAS. Heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are rich laboratories to study the physics of quantum chromodynamics (QCD)… Read More

Carl E. Wieman, Stanford University Taking a scientific approach to science education Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science has advanced rapidly in the past 500 years.  Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science education has remained largely medieval.  Recent research on how people learn, combined with rigorous… Read More