June 2012
  • Undergraduate Andrew Srisuwananukorn (Prof. Giles Novak's group) has been awarded a 2012-2013 Katherine L. Krieghbaum scholarship. These scholarships are given to rising seniors by the Weinberg College or Arts and Sciences to "recognize exceptional promise in undergraduate research in the arts and sciences." Andrew will use his scholarship to support a research project titled, "Submillimeter Polarimetry of Saturn's Rings." Read more about the Krieghbaum scholarship, including how to apply, here.

  • Dan Stevens, a senior in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group, has been selected to receive the J. G. Nolan Scholarship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The scholarship money is replacing funds from another financial aid grant that NU gave to Dan previously, so it's being applied towards tuition (and the like) for the Winter and Spring Quarter.

  • Carl Rodriguez, a graduate student in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group , received honorable mention (joint second place) and a 100-euro prize at the GWPAW 2012 meeting for his poster, titled: "Inadequacies of the Fisher Matrix in the Advanced Detector Era"

  • John Le (Advisor: Prof. Vicky Kalogera) has been awarded a Weinberg Undergraduate Research Grant. This summer he is working with the LIGO and NINJA collaborations to study binary black hole systems.

  • Congratulations to our Seniors Graduating with Honors! This year, four of our graduating seniors have been awarded honors for their outstanding research. Congratulations to all of them for a job well done!
    • Mitchell Drew (Advisor: Prof. Giles Novak),
      "A HEATR for the SHARP Polarimeter at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory"
    • Paul Geringer (Advisor: Prof. Melville Ulmer),
      "Temperature, Abundance, and Mass Density Profiling of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster"
    • Kyle Kremer (Advisor: Prof. Vicky Kalogera),
      "Spin Tilts in the Double Pulsar Reveal Supernova Spin Angular-Momentum Production"
    • Dan Stevens (Advisor: Prof. Vicky Kalogera & supported by Prof. Sandy Zabell, Statistics and Math Depts.),
      "Interpolation Techniques for MCMC Parameter Estimation on Compact Binary Coalescence Graviational-Wave Signals."
        * Dan Stevens received the "Outstanding Senior Thesis in Physics and Astronomy" award for 2012!

  • Dr. Daryl Haggard, CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow, Receives Honorable Mention in L'Oréal Fellowships for Women in Science Program. Each year, L'Oréal awards five fellowships to US-based women postdoctoral researchers to support and promote their advancement in science. The competition for these fellowships is tough: this year, 281 researchers from across science disciplines applied. Standing out among this already strong group, CIERA Fellow Dr. Daryl Haggard advanced to the final round, to which a panel of interdisciplinary scientists admitted only nine applicants. Daryl received an Honorable Mention, and was awarded memberships in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association of Women in Science (AWIS).
May 2012
  • Undergraduate Andrew Srisuwananukorn (Prof. Giles Novak's group) has been awarded a 2012-2013 Katherine L. Krieghbaum scholarship. These scholarships are given to rising seniors by the Weinberg College or Arts and Sciences to "recognize exceptional promise in undergraduate research in the arts and sciences." Andrew will use his scholarship to support a research project titled, "Submillimeter Polarimetry of Saturn's Rings." Read more about the Krieghbaum scholarship, including how to apply, here.

  • Dan Stevens, a senior in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group, has been selected to receive the J. G. Nolan Scholarship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The scholarship money is replacing funds from another financial aid grant that NU gave to Dan previously, so it's being applied towards tuition (and the like) for the Winter and Spring Quarter.

  • Ben Farr, an NSF Graduate Fellow, and a graduate student in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group , has been elected Student Representative for the American Physical Society's Topical Group in Gravitation. The names of all 2012 GGR officers are here. Here is a little more information about the Topical Group in Gravitation.

  • Kevin Broh-Kahn (Computer Science major), has been awarded a Northwestern University Summer Undergraduate Research Grant. The title of his independent research project is: "Performance and Data Analysis of Parallel Monte Carlo Algorithm for Simulating Dense Stellar Systems". Kevin's faculty advisor for this project is Prof. Vicky Kalogera.

  • Prof. Giles Novak (Physics and Astronomy)
    has been awarded the Weinberg College Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research, and Prof. Donna Jurdy (Earth and Planetary Sciences) has been awarded the Weinberg College Outstanding Freshman Advising Awards. The Weinberg College Teaching Awards applaud excellence in instruction, significant contributions to curricular innovation, exemplary mentoring of research and independent study, and fostering of a sense of community both inside and outside the classroom.
February 2012
  • Dan Stevens, a senior in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group, has been selected to receive the J. G. Nolan Scholarship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The scholarship money is replacing funds from another financial aid grant that NU gave to Dan previously, so it's being applied towards tuition (and the like) for the Winter and Spring Quarter.

  • Mike Smutko has accepted a full-time Distinguished Senior Lecturer position in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, starting this Spring. He will be teaching both physics and astronomy courses. For the past eight years, Michael has held a joint appointment with the Adler Planetarium. We are delighted that the Department will now be able to benefit more fully from his expertise.

  • Vivien Raymond (graduate student) accepted an offer for the Richard Chase Tolman Postdoctoral fellowship in Experimental Physics. He will be moving to Caltech following his PhD graduation in Summer 2012. He works in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's research group on physical parameter estimation of gravitational waves from binary coalescence with spinning compact objects within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
January 2012
  • Tsing Wai Wong, graduate student in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's research group, won a CIC - Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship! He will work with Dr. Jeffrey E. McClintock and Dr. Ramesh Narayan at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), who will be his research adviser and co-adviser. He will work on modeling the observed X-ray binaries in our Galaxy, which all host a black hole. The goal is to find out the progenitor mass of the black hole and the possible momentum kick imparted to the black hole during its formation through a core collapse event. He will also work on the hydrodynamics simulation of core collapse supernova to check whether the current core collapse theory can match the results he found in modeling the observed X-ray binaries. He will collaborate with Dr. Chris Fryer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the hydrodynamics simulations of core collapse.

  • Kyle Kremer, a senior in Prof. Vicky Kalogera's group, has won the Churchill Scholarship! With the Churchill Scholarship, Kyle will be pursuing a Masters of Advanced Study degree in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. Kyle will do a Master of Advanced Study in Astronomy, a new program where he will combine courses in Astrophysics and Mathematics with research in astrophysical fluid dynamics and accretion discs. For a story from the Northwestern University NewsCenter, see Trumpeting a Music/Science Combo.
December 2011
  • CIERA co-director, Prof. Frederic A. Rasio has been appointed as the next editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The mission of the letters section is to allow "astrophysicists to rapidly publish short notices of significant original research." Rasio will begin serving as editor on January 1st, 2013. Full article from Northwestern News Center here.
  • CIERA co-director, Prof. Vicky Kalogera, is awarded a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics for her research proposal entitled "Decoding Gravitational-Wave Signals from Compact Object Mergers". The Fellowship will support a full-year sabbatical leave away from teaching and service work and will allow her to focus on research initiatives within the interdisciplinary environment fostered by CIERA. Per the Foundation's guidelines "awards are based on the applicant's scientific accomplishment in the five-year period preceding the application and on a judgment of the potential scientific impact of the leave period." The Foundation makes up to 20 awards in all areas of theoretical physics each year. More details here.

November 2011

  • Bharath Pattabiraman was awarded "Best Poster Award" at the "Conference on Computational Physics", held in Gatlinburg, TN. His poster was titled, "GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo Simulations of Dense Stellar Systems". Bharath works on an interdisciplinary project bridging computer science and astrophysics. His faculty advisors are Prof. Fred Rasio & Prof. Vicky Kalogera from the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Prof. Alok Choudhary from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

September 2011

  • Tristan Matthews, graduate student in Prof. Novak's group, has been awarded a $10,000 Fellowship from NASA's Illinois Space Grant Consortium for 2011-2012. More information about the Illinois Space Grant Consortium here.