The Department of Physics and Astronomy honored several students, faculty, and staff for their achievements on April 25 at the 2023 Awards Colloquium.

Assistant Professor Thomas Folland has been awarded a grant from the Office of Naval Research’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI). The five-year grant, which provides up to $1.5 million in funding annually, is led by Josh Caldwell at Vanderbilt University, and will be shared with the University of Minnesota and Stanford University. The work proposes to study twist optics to better predict emergent properties created by stacking and misorienting various two-dimensional materials.

The University of Iowa received approval from the Board of Regents facilities committee to move ahead with a plan to remodel the seventh floor of the Van Allen Hall.

Cornelia Lang, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences associate dean for undergraduate education and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been appointed to lead a prominent National Science Foundation committee. Lang currently serves as chair of the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee (MPSAC).

Third-year student Jeff Leiberton has been named a Goldwater Scholar, the premier undergraduate scholarship for students pursuing careers in mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering. He is the UI's 63rd Goldwater Scholar and 15th from the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

A paper by Arya Afshari, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Iowa, was recently noted as being a Top 10 Percent Downloaded Paper in the Wiley Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Congratulations to four graduate students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who successfully defended their doctoral theses in April!

Dr. James Van Allen is listed among "9 Hawkeyes Who Deserve Recognition," a recent Iowa Stories article by the Iowa Center for Advancement.

Sawsan Daws graduated from the University of Iowa (UI) in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science degree in applied physics with a concentration in optics. Originally from Saudi Arabia, Daws chose to pursue her undergraduate studies in STEM at the UI because she was intrigued by the research facilities and resources the UI offered to its students. 

This week’s NASA announcement naming the four astronauts who will crew the Artemis Two mission to the Moon is being called “historic” by a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Iowa. Associate Professor Allison Jaynes says she was thrilled to see astronaut Christina Koch assigned to the lunar mission, the first in more than 50 years.