Thesis Defenses:
The following Physics Graduate Students successfully completed their doctoral dissertation defenses over the past year! Their hooding ceremony will take place during commencement May, 2025.
Vidyesh Rao Anisetti
Title: “On Physical Processes that work like learning algorithms.”
Advisor: Professor Jennifer M. Schwarz
Date: August 19, 2024
Maxx Swoger
Title: “Vimentin inside and outside the cell: from cell spreading and nuclear mechanics to COVID-19.”
Advisor: Professor Alison Patteson.
Date: August 15, 2024
Mingwei Dai,
Title: “Dynamical Dark Energy from Lattice Quantum Gravity.”
Advisor: Professor John Laiho.
Date: July 18, 2024
Daniel Vander-Hyde
Title: “Studies towards improved gravitational wave detector thermodynamics.”
Advisor: Professor Stefan Ballmer
Date: June 18, 2024
Title: “Open Quantum Systems in High Energy Physics.”
Advisor: Professor Jay Hubisz.
Date: June 18, 2024
Elenna Capote
Title: “Overcoming Controls and Noise Challenges for High Power Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Detectors.”
Advisor: Professor Stefan Ballmer.
Date: June 6, 2024
Joseph Shupperd
Title: “Design, Construction and Installation of the Upgrade Tracker (UT) in the LHCb experiment.”
Advisor: Professor Steven Blusk.
Date: May 7, 2024.
Kenneth Ratliff
Title: “Gauge-Invariant Correlators In Quantum Gravity.”
Advisor: Professor John Laiho
Date: March 1,2024.
Graduating Seniors - Class of 2024
Congratulations to Our May 2024 Graduates
We are proud to celebrate the achievements of our students who graduated with Physics Majors and Minors in May 2024. Congratulations to all our new alumni!
Chance Baggett, AJ Bekoe, Ruell Branch, Charles Drew, Andrew Esposito, Edward Fluker, Jiawen Ge, Jiachen Lang, Beau Norris, Ivan Palacio Zapata, Zhongjie Ren, Brad Schlapak, Adrian Suciu, Cody Van Nostrand, Ethan Weiss, Brendan Parlee
Awards and Recognitions:
We recognize and congratulate the following students’ awards and accomplishments.
SU News article highlights Emma Kaputa’s journey from SURPH high school student participant a couple of years ago, to now a sophomore in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Her summary of the SURPh internship program won the “Most Social Impact” prize at the 2024 BioInspired Symposium. Emma is the co-author of an article published in the American Chemical Society Journal.
Julia Fancher, a sophomore physics and mathematics major and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, was selected as a Goldwater Scholar for 2024!
Graduate student and undergraduate alum, Dan Paradiso (class of 2022), was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This is a huge honor and very exciting opportunity for Dan to pursue his graduate work in computational astrophysics with Eric Coughlin.
PhD candidate, Aleyna Akyuz among seventy one recipients of dissertation and pre-dissertation fellowship awards through The Graduate School’s Summer Funding Competition.
Sourav Roy and Ava Breibeck, Physics PhD candidates have been selected as Outstanding TA Award recipients for 2024. These awards are reserved for teaching assistants in good academic standing who have made truly distinguished contributions to teaching at Syracuse University.
Liliana Germain, who is pursuing double majors in Neuroscience and Psychology, has been selected as 2024 McKnight Matthew Pecot Fellow. This prestigious award aims to provide opportunities for outstanding college students from underrepresented communities. This Fellowship will support Liliana’s research in the lab of Physics Prof. Mirna Skanata, who is a McKnight awardee herself.
PhD student Ananya Bandopadhyay received a NASA Future Investigator in NASA Earth Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award! This is a three-year grant through NASA that will fund Ananya’s research in understanding an exciting new class of astrophysical phenomena, known as repeating partial tidal disruption events (the proposal title is, “Exploring Repeating Partial Tidal Disruption Events as Sources of Extragalactic Periodic Nuclear Transients”).
Erin McCarthy ’23, physics summa cum laude, guided a study that appeared in March 2024 in Physical Review Letters. It is the most-cited physics letters journal and the eighth-most cited journal in science overall.
Physics students excel at BioInspired Symposium. Yuming Jiang, undergraduate, working with Professors Liviu Movileanu and Antun Skanata, and Tyler Hain, doctoral student, working with Professor Lisa Manning, received awards in the Best Overall Poster category at the BioInspired Symposium 2024. Alexia Chatzitheodorou, doctoral student, under the advice of Professor Christian Santangelo, was interviewed by SUNY Polytechnic Institute President, Winston Oluwole Soboyejo, about her poster.
Department Community Achievement Awards Recipients
We are proud to recognize the outstanding achievements of our students and faculty who have received department awards this year. Their dedication and excellence continue to inspire and elevate our community. The 2024 student honorees by categories are listed below. For faculty recipients, check out the faculty and staff highlights.
Gelling Award: Brendan Parlee.
Beardsley Award: Chance Baggett.
Academic Excellence Awards: Chance Baggett, Charles Drew, Jiachen Lang, Brendan Parlee, Zhongjie Ren, Brad Schlapak.
Social Justice Awards: Jada Garofalo, Bridget Mack, Justin Bartz.
Social Justice Lifetime Achievement award: Ruell Branch.
Outstanding Coaching: Caleb Aguirre – Leon-PHY102, Minseo Kim – PHY102, Chris Vinciguerra – PHY211, Nico O’Neill – PHY211, Jada Garofalo-PHY211, Chloe Naime -PHY211.
Coaching Lifetime Achievement award: Brendan Parlee and Sydney Jud.
Other News:
Undergraduate Physics Students Excel at the A&S Undergraduate Research Festival
Several students presented their physics research projects at the A&S Research festival this year, showcasing their hard work and achievements.” The participants included: Sahana Anand, Chance Baggett, Emma Kaputa, Huangjin “Alex” Liu, Eric Frank, Imara Davis, Arianna Martin, Mason Grieb, Shekainah Shahzad, Nico O’Neill, Carter Halpin, Yuming Jiang, Ta’Nasia Coleman, Sean Labrada, Shan Carter, August Larson, Corinne Motl, Andrew Colosimo, Jada Garofalo, Liliana Germain, Katherine Monroe, Emma Snook, and Meagan Gonzalez.
Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI)
Corinne Motl ’25, a physics major in the College of Arts and Sciences, engaged in an internship at Argonne National Laboratory this summer through a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The SU News highlighted her experience in an article about students' engagement in summer research.
Community Building and Outreach:
Our department has been actively engaged in various community-building and outreach activities. These initiatives aim to foster a sense of belonging among students and strengthen our connections with the broader community. From collaborative projects to volunteer efforts, our students have been making a positive impact both within and outside the university.
Last December the Physic department community collaborated in a new community welcome poster.
September of this year graduate student Shreyan Goswami, and postdocs Bin Wu and Graeme Eddolls from the Syracuse University Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy & Astrophysics, attended the Northside Community Festival to promote and teach the community about Gravitational Waves.
The physics department welcomed its students this year with the annual pancake breakfast on Wednesday, August 21st. It was wonderful to see faculty, staff, post-docs, and graduate students alike come out to enjoy breakfast together to kick off the Fall semester.
As part of the student welcome and orientation, we hosted a research poster session to introduce new students to the current research happening in the department.
Eclipse Celebration. The physics department had a strong participation at the eclipse viewing event April 8. Many of our graduate and undergraduate students volunteered distributing safety glasses, providing science demonstrations and observatory tours to campus visitors.
Hooding Ceremony 2024. Many of the students returned in May for the PhD hooding ceremony. To participate, you had to graduate before mid-April, so we anticipate a few on this list above to return in 2024 for their hooding! It is so exciting to celebrate our graduates’ milestones.
Back row, left to right: Prof. Duncan Brown, Vito Iaia, Chaitanya Afle, Prof. Britton Plourde, Sarthak Gupta, Prof. Jennifer Schwarz and Prof. Christian Santangelo. Front row, left to right: Jiaxin Sun, Lauren Mayse, Prof. Alison Patteson, and Prof. Liviu Movileanu.
Student Organizations Activities
The Society of Physics Students (SPS) and PhyGo are student organizations dedicated to enriching the lives and careers of our physics graduate and undergraduate students, as well as supporting the overall physics department community. Throughout the past year, these organizations have hosted a variety of social and professional development events aimed at fostering community, enhancing skills, and providing valuable networking opportunities for our students.
New SPS leadership board selected for the academic year 2024-2025
- President: Lucas Sarabia
- Vice President: Mason Grieb
- Treasurer: Emerson Long
- Secretary: Carter Halpin/Julia Fancher
- Social Chair: Shan Carter and Abigail Torres
- DEI Chair: Jada Garofalo
Early October the Physics undergrads and SPS came together to give their lounge some TLC!
The Society of Physics Students (SPS) has been quite festive this year, please enjoy some photos they shared from their Halloween party.
SPS members recently celebrated Friendsgiving in the Physics Building! Here are some photos of their event.
PhyGo leadership board selected for the academic year 2024-2025
- President: Julia Rice
- Vice President: Jared Lee
- Treasurer: Ben Maves
- Secretary: Edgar Mao
- Event Coordinator: Ben Byrd
- Public Relations Officer: JT Paustian
PhyGO went apple picking last weekend at Beak & Skiff.
PhyGO has been similarly festive this season–they held a pumpkin carving event, as well as a costume contest! Breck Meagher, a first-year graduate student, won the contest dressed as “a silly fellow, full of joy and whimsy”.