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News and Events
News
- Physics major Travis Pollen won the national championship for the S9 classification 50 meter freestyle at the Paralympics Spring Swimming Nationals in March, 2010. You can watch a piece about Travis on the Philadelphia NBC news.
- Prof. Amy Bug is the Chair-Elect of the APS's Division of Computational Physics. Congratulations, Amy!
- Prof. Michael Brown has been selected to be the chair of the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee. Congratulations, Michael!
- Laboratory Lecturer, Mary Ann Klassen, has been named chair of the AAPT's committee on laboratories. Congratulations, Mary Ann!
- 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic discoveries. Our department hosted a series of talks and public telescope viewings in October and November to help celebrate.
- Our department has an annual holiday party in December to celebrate the winter holidays and the end of the semester; all prospective and current physics and astro majors are invited. Here are some photos from the December 2008 holiday party. We also have a picnic each May. You can view photos from the most recent end-of-year picnic. And there are also photos from the department's graduation party in May, 2009.
- The new Peter van de Kamp Observatory on the roof of the Science Center is open and was dedicated in May, 2009.
  
- Department alumna, Sandra Moore Faber ('66) has won the prestigious Bower Award from the Franklin Institute for her work on galaxy evolution, large scale structure, and related topics. She was honored on campus and gave a colloquium in the Physics and Astronomy Department in April, 2009.
- Emeritus Professor of Physics, Oleksa Bilaniuk has passed away. Read his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- Erin Martell ('09) and Emma Wollman ('09) won first prize for the best student poster at the 16th International Conference on Atomic Processes in Plasmas in Monterey, California, in March, 2009. Erin will be entering the astronomy PhD program at U. Chicago in the fall, and Emma will be entering the physics PhD program at Caltech.
- Prof. Amy Bug has been elected to a three-year term as Vice Chair of the APS's Division of Computational Physics. Congratulations, Amy!
- Prof. Peter Collings is the new chair of the APS's Forum on Education. Congratulations, Peter!
- Prof. Michael Brown has been awarded the American Physical Society's Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution, "[f]or his outstanding contributions to plasma physics made possible by his development of a world-class spheromak laboratory at Swarthmore College, and for his energetic mentoring of undergraduate students." Congratulations, Michael!
- John Mather (Swarthmore '68 physics major) shares the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. His prizewinning work involved measurement of the cosmic microwave background - radiation which dates from the big bang. Read more about his research at the Nobel website, and see his essay on his experience at Swarthmore.
- Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, Wulff Heintz passed away on June 10, 2006. Several nice obituaries are available.
- NPR's Morning Edition did a piece on our home: the Science Center and, specifically, on efforts to minimize bird deaths from collisions with our large windows.
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 Prof. Peter Collings, as a member of a research team at U. Penn led by Ahmed Alsayed and Prof. Arjun Yodh, have explained an important component of the process by which materials melt. Their work appears in the August 19 issue of Science, in an article titled "Premelting at Defects within Bulk Colloidal Crystals." You can also read about it in this press release from the University of Pennsylvania.
Events
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