Physics Department

News and Awards

  • Professor Valeri Petkov received the President's Award, CMU's most prestigious research award. The award recognizes the career achievements of senior faculty members.
  • Dr. Mihai Horoi was named to the Advisory Board of the UNEDF Collaboration, a large group of scientists at various institutions across the United States, Europe and Japan working in the area of theoretical nuclear physics. Follow the link below for more details:
        http://www.unedf.org/sci_council.html
  • Dr. Veronica Barone is first author of a “hot-paper”, one of the top-ten cited papers in Nano Letters in the past 2 years: "Electronic Structure and Stability of Semiconducting Graphene Nanoribbons" Barone, V.; Hod, O.; Scuseria, G. E. Nano Lett.; (Letter); 2006; 6(12); 2748-2754.
  • Professor Alan Jackson gave a seminar entitled “Structure and Properties of Atomic Clusters when every atom counts” in the Electrical Engineering Dept at the University of Cincinnati on Jan. 25th.  He will be giving the same talk in the Physics Dept at Western Michigan University on Monday, Feb. 18.
  • Professor Chris Tycner was awarded a PRIF grant for his project entitled: “High Angular Resolution Investigation of Disk-forming Massive Stars”.
  • Professor Valeri Petkov was the guest editor of Volume 222 of Zeitschrift fuer Kristallographie, an international journal devoted to work in crystallography.
  • Professor Juan Peralta is being recognized for authoring one of the “Top-50 most cited articles” in the Chemical Physics Letters from 2003 to 2007. He will be receiving a certificate from the journal’s publisher.   The article is:
    J.E. Peralta, G.E. Scuseria, J.R. Cheeseman, M.J. Frisch, “Basis set dependence of NMR spin-spin couplings in density functional theory calculations: First row and hydrogen atoms”, Chemical Physics Letters, Volume 375, Issue 5-6 (2003), Pages 452-458
  • Professor Joseph Finck and undergraduate student Amy Deline received the “Best Paper of the Conference” award at the College Teaching and Learning Conference held from January 2-5, 2008 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The title of their presentation was “Students Giving Students Advice before the First Day“