Department News | Physics & Astronomy

Sihao Cheng, a graduate student in the department working with Associate Professor Brice Ménard, has won the 2020 International Astrostatistics Association award for the Outstanding Publication in Astrostatistics led by a graduate student. Only one student is selected for this honor every two years. The publication that earned Cheng this recognition is titled “A new approach to […]

Space@Hopkins, led by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Chuck Bennett, connects the array of Johns Hopkins University divisions, departments, and collaborative institutions in their common pursuit of civilian space research. The 2020 Space@Hopkins Virtual Symposium video features astronaut Captain Reid Wiseman (JHU WSE ‘06) and five Space@Hopkins seed grant recipients.

JHU Physics and Astronomy Advisory Council welcomed three of the department’s cutting-edge scientists to share their research via Zoom. This video allows viewers to learn first-hand about the exciting research being conducted by a graduate student, a postdoctoral fellow and a faculty member. Featuring: Melissa DiamondMelissa is a graduate student working with Dr. David Kaplan. […]

A paper on research by Jared Kaplan and colleagues has been selected by the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) for a Best Paper Award.  This is one of the most prestigious awards a paper can win in the world of Artificial Intelligence.   The paper describes GPT-3, the largest and most sophisticated language model ever constructed. It demonstrates […]

December 2-10, 2020, marks the 30th anniversary of the Astro-1 space shuttle mission (STS-35) aboard the orbiter Columbia. This mission carried the Astro Observatory into space for a dedicated ultraviolet astronomy mission, including the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) for which JHU professor Arthur F. Davidsen was the Principal Investigator. HUT was a 0.9m telescope with a prime […]

Tim Heckman, chair of the Department and the inaugural Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professoris, is among 489 distinguished scholars recognized this year as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society. Fellows are selected annually for their contributions to their respective fields and the body […]

Physics major Junjia Zhang has been selected to receive the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award for the current academic year. Junjia is working with Assistant Professor Yi Li in theoretical condensed matter physics. Provost Joseph Cooper (1991-1995) established the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award program in 1993 with a generous endowment by the Hodson Trust. The program was […]

Lucie Afko, a sophomore physics major, is featured in the “Field Notes” section of the fall 2020 edition of Arts & Sciences Magazine. The article details Lucie’s hands-on experience working with data from the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) telescope over the summer.

Tuesday, December 1, 2020, Start Time: 12:30pm, End Time: 2:00pmRegistration now open Chaired by Dr. Tim Heckman, the JHU Physics and Astronomy Advisory Council is pleased to invite select alumni and friends to this virtual event featuring three of the department’s cutting-edge scientists.  This event will allow attendees to learn first-hand about the exciting research […]

Associate Professor Brice Ménard and former postdoctoral fellow in the department, Yi-Kuan Chiang, have published research in Astrophysical Journal that demonstrates how the temperature of galaxy clusters today, on average, is 10 times hotter than 10 billion years ago. “We have measured temperatures throughout the history of the universe,” said Ménard, “As time has gone […]