Physics Faculty Research Awards Dongping Zhong, the Robert Smith Professor of Physics and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, given for prior achievement and exceptional promise. Zhong studies biological dynamics imaging in space and time by four-dimensional electron microscopy. His grant will support teaching-release time to work in another institute to develop/expand his research. Assistant Professor Amy Connolly’s five-year, $650,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help support her search for high-energy neutrinos, a type of ubiquitous elementary particle, traveling at the speed of light, sometimes called “ghost particles” because they are so hard to find that only sophisticated experiments can catch and measure their properties. CAREER awards recognize and encourage the careers of exceptional and promising young researchers. Christopher Hirata, professor of astronomy and physics, is one of 21 scientists designated Simons Investigators by the Simons Foundation. Each member of this inaugural group is eligible to receive more than $1.3 million over the next 10 years to fund innovative research. Hirata also is one of 96 researchers to receive a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)–the highest honor given by the U.S. government to scientists and engineers early in their research careers. Jason Ho (2012) and Eric Braaten (2013) received Simons Foundation Fellowships to support an exclusive year-long focus on research. The Simons Foundation, which supports advancing the frontiers of basic science and mathematics, awarded their first MPS (Mathematics and Physical Sciences) Fellowships in 2012 to fund the theoretical work of outstanding mathematicians and physicists.
physics.osu.edu
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Developing the World’s Most Powerful Digital Camera: Professor Klaus Honscheid’s new software is running a powerful new camera designed to answer one of the biggest mysteries in physics— the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), located on a mountaintop in Chile—will help Dark Energy Survey (DES) researchers explore why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Capturing the first real-time images of atoms moving in a molecule: Professor Louis DiMauro and his team used a new ultrafast camera to catch the first-ever, real-time images of two atoms vibrating in a molecule—the first step to observing and controlling chemical reactions on an atomic scale.
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