Eric Sembrat's Test Bonanza

Physics undergraduate student Holly Tinkey has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her proposal on "Metal Halide intercalation of multi-layered graphene films".

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in fields within NSF's mission. The GRFP provides three years of support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering research.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Curtis was featured in The Whistle.

Grahame Vittorini was one of 12 graduate students selected to present a poster of his research at the third annual GTRI Shackelford Showcase.  His presentation was titled “Efficient Sympathetic Cooling of Trapped Ions in Planar Ion Traps.”

The Shackelford Graduate Fellows Program is designed to provide an environment for graduate level research while providing financial support to qualified graduate students. The program also provides another avenue for academic collaboration between the research units at GTRI and various academic units through joint direction and supervision of graduate student research.

The program honors the service and personal integrity which Robert Shackelford brought to GTRI during his 34-year career at Georgia Tech.

On March 29, the College of Sciences hosted a reception in honor of Prof. Mei-Yin Chou's service as School Chair and welcoming Prof. Paul Goldbart as he takes on the role of Chair.

To view all the photos, go to this link.

Deirdre Shoemaker has been granted a promotion at Georgia Tech, to the rank of Associate Professor.  

Deirdre Shoemaker came to Georgia Tech in 2008 as a founding member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.  Earlier, she had been an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, where she had been a postdoctoral researcher, following her 1999 Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin.  She is a theorist who solves the equations of general relativity numerically -- work that is timely and potentially very influential, as it is widely anticipated that gravitational waves from black holes and neutron stars will be observable in the near future.  Deirdre’s group is one of the leading teams both for modeling the events that produce gravity waves and for analyzing the data encoded in those waves.  Her accomplishments and promise have been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER award.  

The Georgia Tech Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE) is a premier national research and educational resource center that creates flexible organic photonic and electronic materials and devices that serve the information technology, telecommunications, energy, and defense sectors.  In 2011, Physics graduate student Keith Carroll received a COPE award. Keith is a graduate student in Professor Jennifer Curtis's lab , and collaborates with Profs. Elisa Riedo's and Seth Marder's labs.

COPE creates the opportunity for disruptive technologies by developing new materials with emergent properties and by providing new paradigms for device design and fabrication.  Keith’s research focuses on the development and applications of thermochemical nanolithography.  The aim is to improve current capabilities with respect to resolution, speed, and versatility.  The ultimate intent is to open the technique to a number of applications ranging from biophysics to electronics.

COPE Awards help enable a new generation of devices and systems that meet the challenges that these sectors and our ever-changing society face in this decade and the future.

Three faculty members from
the Georgia Institute of Technology were awarded 2011 Sloan Research
Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Christopher J. Peikert, from the
College of Computing, along with Silas D. Alben and Shina Tan in the College of
Sciences, were three of 118 outstanding researchers selected from across the
country. They were the only recipients of the award from the state of Georgia. Awarded
annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and
scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute
substantially to their fields.

Drawn from 54 colleges and
universities in the U.S. and Canada, this year’s fellows represent an
extraordinarily
broad range of research interests, including an astronomer who studies the
birth of new planets, a computer scientist who examines how changes in computer
network architecture can save energy, an economist who investigates the
game-theoretical foundations of cooperation, and a
mathematician
who uses geometry to model how the brain represents stimuli.

“The scientists and
researchers selected for this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships represent the
very brightest rising stars of this generation of scholars,” says Paul
L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The
Foundation is proud to be able to support their work at this important stage in
their careers.”

Silas
Alben, an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics, studies how fluids
flow and exert forces on flexible solid bodies. His research is designed to enhance
understanding of how fish swim in an effort to guide the design of swimming
robots.  He also investigates how thin
solid plates can deform to create novel three-dimensional structures.

Shina
Tan, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, studies the theory of
dilute cold matter, which is millions of times thinner than the air and
billions of times colder than an average home freezer. His research may have
applications to sensitive detection and precision measurements.

Christopher
Peikert, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, focuses on
geometric “lattices” as a new mathematical foundation for cryptography (the
science of developing secret codes and the use of those codes in an encryption
system). In principle, quantum computers could break much of the cryptography
in wide use today, so there is a strong need for alternative schemes. The
lattice approach yields very simple schemes that are highly efficient and
parallelizable.

Administered and funded by
the Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in close cooperation
with the
scientific community. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by
their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior
scholars.

The $50,000 fellowships are
awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics,
evolutionary and
computational molecular biology, neuroscience and physics. In 2012, in
recognition of the important work done by Sloan-sponsored researchers working
on the Census of Marine Life, the award program will be
expanded to include fellowships in ocean sciences.

For a complete list of
winners, visit: www.sloan.org/fellowships/page/21

Adapted from a release by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation is
a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in
New York City.
Established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive
officer of the
General Motors Corporation, the Foundation makes grants in support of original
research and
education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic
performance. www.sloan.org.

Awarded annually since 1955, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. “The scientists and researchers selected for this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships represent the very brightest rising stars of this generation of scholars,” says Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Foundation is proud to be able to support their work at this important stage in their careers.”  Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Assistant Professor Shina Tan’s nomination to the Sloan Foundation was prepared by Professor Mei-Yin Chou.

As the communication from the Sloan Foundation states: “...this is an extraordinarily competitive award, involving nominations for most of the very best scholars of [Shina's] generation from the United States and Canada.” The School applauds this external recognition of what we have known for some time—that Shina has discovered beautiful and timeless results in the exciting field of the physics of ultracold atoms and molecules, and that the research paths that he is currently charting are brimming with potential.
 
Other Sloan Fellows from the School of Physics are Professor Mei-Yin Chou (1990), Professor Ahmet Erbil (1985), and Professor Ronald Fox (1974).

Dr. Edwin Greco and Associate Professor Roman Grigoriev won the François Frenkiel Award from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society.

Using large-scale supercomputer calculations, researchers have analyzed how the placement of metallic contacts on graphene changes the electron transport properties of the material as a factor of junction length, width and orientation.  The work is believed to be the first quantitative study of electron transport through metal-graphene junctions to examine earlier models in significant detail.

View the entire article here.