The National Science Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Tom Folland a $604,691 grant for a project that will determine how certain classes of crystals can be used to control both direction, and orientation of light waves. These materials can form a key part of creating advanced optical technologies including laser imaging, optical biosensors, and quantum optics.

University of Iowa alumni and SpaceX employees, Zachary Luppen and Suman Sherwani, watched the successful launch of Crew-6 to the International Space Station.

International Programs at the University of Iowa has awarded David Hartley,  assistant research scientist in Physics and Astronomy, a $1,200 travel grant to give a presentation on his research in Sapparo, Japan.

University of Iowa alumna Kawther Rouabhi, now in a Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for her talk at the AGU Fall Meeting Dec. 12-16, 2022 in Chicago. The honor is awarded for only the most exceptional presentations during the meeting, as determined by judge evaluations.

Saturday, February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To mark the event, the Physics and Astronomy DEI committee has produced a video. It includes remarks from Sara Sanders, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Science followed by highlights of the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP).

NASA has awarded the FIREBall-2 UV balloon telescope mission $644,229 over four years to perform two more flights. Assistant Professor Keri Hoadley is a co-investigator in this multi-international research collaboration.

Assistant Research Scientist Scott Bounds is serving as the principal investigator for the Aurora Current and Electrodynamics Structures II (ACES II) mission, which launched rockets from Andøya Space in Norway on Nov. 20, 2022. The NASA-funded project measured the global electric circuit underlying the Northern Lights. 

Women in physics have been grossly underrepresented for decades, but a recent conference hosted by the UI Department of Physics and Astronomy, a program housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is working to help change that.  The American Physical Society selected Iowa to host a regional Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, or CUWiP. The January 20-22 event brought dozens of undergraduates from the UI and other Midwest colleges and universities to Iowa City to learn about the industry, how to get involved in research, and best practices for applying to graduate school.  

Undergraduate students from across the United States came to campus last July, enticed by the prospect of stewarding a mission to explore Earth or space. The students were the first group to enroll in a new class, called the Edge of Space Academy, offered by Iowa as another marker of its living, breathing legacy in space-based research.

The Space Telescope Science Institute has awarded Assistant Professor Keri Hoadley $24,799 for a project entitled “Jets and disk scattering - Spatially resolved optical and FUV observations of AA Tau.” The award is for a Hubble Space Telescope program to analyze new far-ultraviolet and optical observations of a protostar hosting a planet-forming disk, analogous to the one formed in our own Solar System.