Thesis defenses
The following Physics Graduate Students have received their PhDs over the past year!
Varun Srivastava defended his thesis February 2, 2022. His advisor was Prof. Stefan Ballmer, and the title of his dissertation is: “Detector Improvements and Optimization to Advance Gravitational-Wave Astronomy.”
Scott Ely defended his thesis on February 8, 2022. The title of his dissertation is “Measurement of |Vcb| with \Lambda_b \rightarrow \Lambda_c \mu \nu Semileptonic Decays.” His advisor was Professor Marina Artuso.
Aravindhan Venkateswaran defended his dissertation, “Probing lepton flavour universality with B0 -> K* tau tau decays.” March 9, 2022. His advisor was Professor Matt Rudolph.
Jikai Wang: defended his dissertation April 2, 2022. The title of his thesis is “Self-organization in models of cyclically-sheared suspensions.” His advisors were Professors Joseph Paulsen and Jennifer Schwarz.
Ali Imran defended his dissertation “WDR5 network analysis using ensemble approaches” on May 12, 2022. His advisor was Professor Liviu Movileanu. He is currently working at Pfizer.
Abhilash Yallappa Dombara defended his dissertation titled “Constraining Beam Backgrounds and Analyzing the Detector Response in a Test Beam with the NOvA Experiment” on May 26, 2022. He collaborated with Professor Denver Whittington.
Michelle Berry defended her thesis “Mechanologic: Designing Mechanical Devices That Compute,” May 10 2022. She collaborated with Professor Christian Santangelo
Kyle Spurgeon defended his dissertation “Characterization of Scintillation Light in Large Liquid Argon Detectors and the Implications on Proton Decay Searches.” June 16, 2022. His advisor was Professor Denver Whittington
Kyung Eun Kim defended her dissertation August 2, 2022. The title of her thesis is “Geometry of Discrete and Continuous Bounded Surfaces.” Her advisor was Professor Christian Santangelo.
Muhammad Asaduzzaman defended his thesis “Investigation of Lattice Holographic Theories” Aug 2, 2022. His advisor was Professor Simon Catterall.
Zhuoming Li defended his dissertation August 18, 2022. Li’s advisor was Professor Steven Roy Blusk. The title of the candidate’s dissertation is: “Observation of the Ξ−b → Λ0b π− decay and measurement of B (Ξ−b → Λ0b π−).”
Harris Bernstein’s oral doctoral examination was held September 1, 2022. Bernstein’s advisor was Professor Matthew Rudolph. The title of the candidate’s dissertation is “Measuring Branching Fractions of B Meson Decays.”
Ohana Benevides Rodrigues defended her dissertation titled “Search for muDAR Electron Neutrinos in MicroBooNE” September 2, 2022. Dr. Benevides Rodrigues ' advisor was Mitchell Soderberg.
Kenneth Dodge defended his dissertation titled “Characterization of superconducting hardware for implementing quantum stabilizers.”
September 15. His advisor was Professor Britton Plourde. They will continue working together in a postdoctoral position supported by a grant from ORISE awarded to Professor Plourde.
Yebin Liu’s oral doctoral examination was held on September 26, 2022. The title of the candidate’s dissertation is: “Designing and modeling superconducting hardware for implementing quantum stabilizers” and his advisor was Professor Britton Plourde.
Michael Senatore also defended his dissertation on September 26, 2022. The title of his dissertation is: “High-fidelity, universal gates performed on a coherence-enhanced qubit.” His advisor was Professor Britton Plourde.
Raj De defended his thesis: “Geometric confinement of thin films: From crumple formation to curvature-induced propulsion” November 22, 2022. His advisor was Professor Joseph Paulsen.
Merrill Asp who collaborated with Professor Alison Patteson, defended his thesis December 5, 2022. The title of the candidate’s dissertation is: “The Biophysics of Bacterial Collective Motion: Measuring Responses to Mechanical and Genetic Cues.” He accepted a postdoctoral position at Yale University.
Graduating Seniors – Class of 2022
We had nine majors (BS/BA) and four minors graduating in 2022. Majors are Ava Breitbeck, Catherine Campbell, Victoria Corrado, Nicholas Crane, Isabella Lee, Daniel Paradiso, Ethan Stocham, Isaiah Alexis, Paul Franco. Minors are Sean Manzella, Tyler Marston, Romeo Michelson, Aparajita Rao.
Awards and Recognitions
Juanitta “AJ” Bekoe, physics minor, physics coach, an aerospace engineering major, has earned the prestigious Patti Grace Smith Fellowship! AJ will work this summer at Ball Aerospace.
Senior Physics Major Matt Cufari received several important awards this year. He was named a Goldwater scholar! Matt was also selected by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation to join the elite group of Astronaut Scholars for the 2022/2023 academic school year. His achievement was featured on the SU News. This year, Cufari become the first Syracuse University recipient of the LeRoy Apker award
The graduate school awarded three dissertation summer fellowships to Physics PhD candidates Raj De from Paulsen Lab, Sarthak Gupta from Schwarz and Patteson groups and Yiming Xu from Mihovilovic Skanata Lab
Michael “MP” Geiss, a double major of citizenship affairs and Physics, named the University’s Class of 2023 Senior Class Marshal. Geiss will represent their graduating class and lead the student procession during the 2023 Commencement ceremony. Throughout his senior year, Geiss will serve as the all-University representative for the Class of 2023.
PhD Candidate Lauren Mayse from Prof. Movileanu’ s research group won second place for her poster presentation at the BioInspired Symposium held October 7.
Monica Ripp, PhD’22, will be the recipient of one of the All-University Doctoral Prizes awarded to the students at the College of Arts and Sciences. The award was presented at the doctoral hooding ceremony on May 13, 2022.
The Physics Department earned two Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award recipients for 2022. Graduate students Tyler Hain and Gwen Hartshaw. The Outstanding TA awards are reserved for teaching assistants in good academic standing who have made truly distinguished contributions to teaching at Syracuse University.
Departmental awards
Current graduate student, Ava Breitbeck, was awarded the Beardsley Award from the Physics Department during her senior year. Ava was also a Class of 2022 Marshall for the College of Arts and Sciences! She entered a PhD program at Syracuse University on College Science teaching.
Former graduating Senior, Catherine Campbell, was awarded the Gelling Prize from the Physics Department. Catherine is currently attending medical school at USC.
Graduating seniors with outstanding GPAs are awarded the Academic Excellence Prize. Awards were given at the end of the spring 2022 semester as follow to the following recipients: Ava Breitbeck, Catherine Campbell, Victoria Corrado, Nicholas Crane, Isabella Lee, Daniel Paradiso, and Ethan Stocum
The Department also awarded five undergraduate peer coaches as outstanding coaching assistants to Juanita “AJ” Bekoe, Kiersten Edwards, Sydney Jud, Brenden Parlee and Sam Testani
This year the department handed several Social Justice and Community Building Awards to members of the department. This is the second year of this new tradition to recognize those that do outstanding work on Inclusivity, equity, outreach, and community building:
Current graduate student, Daniel Paradiso, ran the Society of Physics Students and worked to make the department spaces and people more welcoming for all while he was an undergraduate. Dan graduated from our undergraduate program in the Spring 2022 semester.
Graduate students Merrill Asp and Sarthak Gupta for their work creating new outreach programs for K-12 students in Syracuse schools.
Graduate student Elenna Capote for her work as the student advocate in the EID committee and for working to bring unheard voices to the leadership.
Other News
Undergraduate physics researcher, Matt Cufari, who studies with Prof. Eric Coughlin just had two papers accepted back-to-back to the Astrophysical Journal. The papers are entitled: “Using the Hills Mechanism to Generate Repeating Partial Tidal Disruption Events and ASASSN-14ko” and the “The Eccentric Nature of Eccentric Tidal Disruption Events”. Matt is a senior this year.
PhyGo leadership board selected for the academic year 2022-2023
Clayton Larson, President
Sounok Ghosh, Vice President
Nimisha Krishnan, Treasurer
Sierra Thomas, Secretary
Renita Saldanha, Event Coordinator
JT Paustian, Public Relations Officer
New SPS leadership board selected for the academic
year 2022-2023
President: Hong Beom Lee
Vice Presidents: Tanner Demaree, Nathan Magers
Secretary: Michael Perry
Treasurer: James Harford
Social Media Chair: Anthony Mazzacane
Physics Graduate Student, Sarthak Gupta, was awarded a travel grant to attend the Biophysical Society this week! Additionally, several Syracuse Physics students attended and presented their work including undergraduates.
Coaches having fun! Many of our physics coaches have become friends while working together, and last week five of them celebrated their friendship with a trip to Montreal.
Physics had an outstanding showing of physics-related talks and posters at the Undergraduate Research Festival that took place on April 22. Daniel Paradiso, Jakub Kochanowski, Erin McCarthy, and Chance Baggett presented talks while Matt Cufari, Diego Luna, Hong Beom, Nathan Magers, Oduduabasi Isaiah, Nedine Abdelhamid, Carina Boyce, Sophia Martin, Niaz Goodbee, Nicolle Laines, India Aikens and Jenna Cammerino presented posters.
Graduate students Tianna McBroom, Brad Cole, Vito Iaia, and Clay Larson from the Plourde research group gave presentations at the New York State Nanotechnology Network Symposium at Cornell on May 19. Notably, Tianna McBroom won a best poster award. More information can be found on the CNF site
PhD candidate, Kenny Ratliff accepted a two-year visiting professorship position at Kenyon College. He is currently teaching there.
Graduate student, Suman Kundu, had a new paper accepted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In this paper Suman and his advisor, Prof. Eric Coughlin provide a generalization to the analytic solution that describes accretion onto a newly formed neutron star, and in which they incorporate general relativistic effects in the Schwarzschild geometry. This solution is of importance for understanding neutron star formation and shock propagation in core-collapse supernovae.
Discover Magazine, published an article highlighting recent work of graduate students Suman Kumar Kundu, Arnab Pradhan and emeritus faculty Carl Rosenzweig.
In the News
Undergraduate Researcher in Physics, Diego Luna, was highlighted in a recent article on students graduating in the class of 2022. Diego is a Biotechnology major who does research in the Ross Lab in the Physics Department.
Former PhD candidate Ohana Benevides Rodrigues who recently graduated was featured in the article from the University Research Association entitled “From Brazil to Batavia: How Ohana Benevides Rodrigues found her new home at Fermilab”. Ohana was stationed at Fermilab while pursuing her PhD degree.
A manuscript authored by graduate student Merrill Asp, was published by PNAS Nexus. The manuscript is titled Spreading rates of bacterial colonies depend on substrate stiffness and permeability. The College of Arts and Sciences wrote an article about Merrill’s accomplishment. Read the A&S News
Graduate students Sarthak Gupta and Merrill Asp outreach program highlighted in the A&S News. Merrill defended his dissertation early December.