The Duke Teaching Observatory, with Prof. Ronen Plesser and Lab Administrator Yuriy Bomze, was featured on DukeToday. Click here to read "Spend an Evening Among Stars and Planets." This article was also published in the August/September 2015 edition of Working@Duke employee magazine on page 10. Additionally, WRAL picked up the story.

“I like to build things that don’t exist,” says entrepreneur William J. “Bill” Brown, who earned his PhD in physics from Duke in 1999. “In physics, I did tabletop experiments where I had to do it all—optics, electronics, mechanics, software, and theory. Now, I view a company as something new I’m building.”

In his search for evidence of cosmic inflation, Duke Physics alum Jamie Bock (B.S. ’87) uses on-ground telescopes, high-altitude balloons, rockets, and satellites. Bock is a professor of physics at Caltech as well as a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Our groups build one-of-a-kind instruments to answer questions about the early universe,” he says.

This July, graduate student Venkitesh Ayyar attended "Prospects in Theoretical Physics" at the "Princeton Summer School on Condensed Matter Physics." Pictured below are all participants and speakers.

Undergraduate Physics student Jenny Su (B.S. '15) has written an article about the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics held at Duke this past January. Su's article is a "Meeting Notes" feature in the spring 2015 issue of The SPS Observer, the magazine of the Society of Physics Students. See the full issue here. Su's contribution is on pages 26 and 31.

From August 3-7, Duke Kunshan University (DKU), with co-host Shanghai Jiao Tong University, held the seventh Workshop on Hadron Physics in China and Opportunities Worldwide that gave scientists the opportunity to present research and exchange ideas in hadron physics. Duke Physics Profs. Berndt Mueller and Haiyan Gao were in attendance. Read more on DKU's website here.

John H. Gibbons (PhD '54), one of the earliest PhDs in nuclear physics from Duke University and Presidential Science Advisor under Bill Clinton from 1993-1998, died from complications from a stroke on Tuesday July 18, 2015. You can read his obituary in The New York Times here.

Jiani Huang has been awarded as a Scholar in the prestigious John T. Chambers Scholar program for 2015-2017 in the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics (FIP) at the Pratt School of Engineering. Huang was nominated by her advisor Prof. Maiken Mikkelsen. The John T. Chambers Fellowship Program has been a part of FIP since 2001 and provides monetary support for graduate student recipients. Congratulations to Jiani!

Profs. Maiken Mikkelsen and David Smith's group has published a new paper in Nature. Read "Ultrafast spontaneous emission source using plasmonic nanoantennas" online here.

There has been significant media coverage on their paper as well:

Prof. Ayana Arce, postdoc Enrique Kajomovitz and graduate student Lei Li, members of the High Energy Physics research group, have been investigating mysterious features of the ATLAS data from the Large Hadron Collider. Recently they made their results public. Below are links to two news articles with more information.