On Friday, July 10, Trinity College announced that Prof. Warren S. Warren will be appointed as the new Chair of the Department of Physics beginning September 1, 2015. Prof. Warren is a James B. Duke Professor with appointments in Physics, Chemistry, Radiology and Biomedical Engineering and is also the Director of the Center for Molecular and Biomolecular Imaging. See Warren's faculty profile here and visit the Warren Group page here. Congratulations and welcome!

Chris Flower, a Physics undergraduate student working in Prof. Haiyan Gao's group, was selected as a 2015-2016 Undergraduate American Nuclear Scholar by the American Nuclear Society. Flower will be recognized at the ANS national chapter meeting in San Antonio later this year.

The Physics Department has selected graduate students Ron Malone and Andrew Seredinski for the Mary Creason Memorial Award for 2015. Their performances as Teaching Assistants in the introductory laboratory courses has been exemplary and highly appreciated by their colleagues in the department. Certificates will be presented to Malone and Seredinksi at the Annual Physics Department Picnic on Saturday, August 22.

More information on this award can be found on the Fellowships page here.

The Physics Department has nominated graduate students Kevin Holway and Xiaojun Yao for the AAPT Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2015. Their performances as Teaching Assistants have been exemplary and highly appreciated by their colleagues in the department. With the award, AAPT also offers the students one year of free membership. Certificates will be presented to Holway and Yao at the Annual Physics Department Picnic on Saturday, August 22.

Profs. Henry Greenside and Roxanne Springer have been recognized for receiving course evaluations in the top 5% of all undergraduate courses in the categories of Quality of Course and/or Intellectual Stimulation for small classes (Springer) or mid-size classes (Greenside). Greenside taught PHY 162: Fundamentals of Physics II and this is his third year in a row receiving this distinction.

Sargis Karapetyan, a Physics graduate student in Prof. Nicolas Buchler's lab was featured in DukeToday for his paper "Redox rhythm reinforces the circadian clock to gate immune response." Read the DukeToday article "Dual Internal Clocks Keep Plant Defenses on Schedule" here and read the paper on Nature's website here.

Mathematics and Physics Prof. Jianfeng Lu has been named the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The theme of this award is to develop advanced computational methods for quantum and statistical mechanics. See details along with Lu's abstract here.

Prof. Warren S. Warren was featured in a Pratt School of Engineering news release about his work with pump-probe spectroscopy that has aided the fields of both medicine and art. Read the article "A New Way of Looking at Melanomas and Renaissance Paintings" here.

Prof. Phil Barbeau, assistant professor in Physics, has been awarded a Department of Energy Early Career Research Award from the Office of High Energy Physics. The program supports the development of individual research programs of outstanding scientists early in thier careers and also stimulates research careers in the areas supported by the DOE Office of Science. Barbeau is one of 44 early career selectees this year; there were 27 from universities and 17 from national laboratories.

Profs. Maiken Mikkelsen and David R. Smith with others, including researchers Gleb Akselrod and Thang Ba Hoang have had a new paper published in Nano Letters. You can read Leveraging Nanocavity Harmonics for Control of Optical Processes in 2D Semiconductors" here.