Read about the latest thesis defenses, awards and news highlights from students in the Department of Physics.
Thesis Defenses
Indrajeet Sagar successfully defended his dissertation titled “Multimode Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics with Superconducting Metamaterial Resonators” on July 27, 2021.
Mahesh Gandikota defended his thesis dissertation entitled “Interplay of geometry and mechanics: disordered spring networks and shape changing cerebellum.” His advisor was Professor Jennifer Schwarz.
On August 12, 2021, Daniel Finstad successfully defended his dissertation titled “Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Gravitational-Wave Measurements of their Parameters and the Nuclear Equation of State.”
Erik Muniz, successfully defended his thesis entitled “A Solid-State Phase Camera for Advanced Gravitational Wave Detectors” on August 27, 2021. His advisor was Prof. Stefan Ballmer.
Mengqi Xu successfully defended her thesis on September 17th. She accepted a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
Baasansuren Batsukh defended his thesis on 28th September. Baasansuren’s thesis work was with Professor Tomasz Skwarnicki.
Monica Ripp, successfully defended her PhD thesis on 15th October 2021 for work she did with Professor Joseph Paulsen on thin film mechanics. She climbed Mrs. Jennings' leg that afternoon.
Eric King successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled Utilizing Parity Violating Electron Scattering as a Probe to Measure the Neutron Radius of 208-Pb, on Tuesday, October 26. His advisor was Prof. Paul Souder.
Michael Wilkinson successfully defended his thesis on Friday, December 10, 2021. His work on the first measurement of the branching fraction of the Xi-c-0 baryon in its decay to pion and lambda-c hadrons was performed at the LHCb experiment under the guidance of late Prof. Sheldon Stone.
Sumon Sahu, graduate student working with Prof. Ross successfully defended his thesis, “Self-organization of microtubules and microtubule-associated proteins, MAP65” December 14.
Catherine Campbell, medicinal chemistry and physics major, is one of 12 undergraduate students awarded WiSE research summer funds.
Physics graduate student Maxx Swoger won a Best Poster award at the Physics of Cancer Symposium. The event was held in Leipzig, Germany and Maxx attended virtually. He received a cash prize for his accomplishment.
Physics graduate alumna Eva Nesbit is now a visiting assistant professor at Kenyon College.
Undergraduate physics majors Ava Breitbeck, Matt Cufari and Hong Boem Lee were awarded grants from the SOURCE or Honors Program for their research.
Physics graduate student Sarthak Gupta, working with Professors Alison Patteson and Jennifer Schwarz, has new work published in the New Journal of Physics. The college communications office wrote a story about their work.
Undergraduate physics major Matthew Cufari and Professor Eric Coughlin had a new paper accepted in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper discusses how a star is destroyed by a black hole when the star is in an elliptic or hyperbolic orbit about the black hole. They showed that such tidal disruption events can have quite interesting properties depending on the orbital parameters of the star. The paper can be viewed now on arXiv.