Despite the enormous hurdles presented by the pandemic, the University of Iowa secured its highest-ever level of external funding for research, scholarship, and creative activities last year—including research contributing to the development of effective COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

Duality, the nation’s first accelerator exclusively for quantum companies, has accepted six startups for Cohort 1. Duality is led by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), along with founding partners, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33.

Casey DeRoo, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, will focus on building and measuring the performance of an optical element known as a diffraction grating. Diffraction gratings are used in conjunction with astronomical telescopes to form spectra, which show how the brightness of a source is divided up by energy.

As the Parker Solar Probe ventures closer to the sun, we are learning new things about our home star. In a new study, physicists led by the University of Iowa report the first definitive measurements of the sun’s electric field, and how the electric field interacts with the solar wind, the fast-flowing current of charged particles that can affect activities on Earth, from satellites to telecommunications.

University of Iowa physicists have won NASA funding to leverage their expertise in fabricating and testing gratings for use in the ultraviolet range in space-based astronomy. Keri Hoadley, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is collaborating with Casey DeRoo, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, whose group has been honing a new way to fabricate reflection gratings for X-rays, which are at shorter wavelengths than ultraviolet light. Hoadley and her team will take advantage of that progress and try to apply it for ultraviolet light use.

Congratulations to Dr. Mohammad Alhusseini for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis yesterday, July 12th!

Today two of our former students ran into each other at SpaceX Headquarters in California. Suman Sherwani is an Iowa alum and former employee in the Dept.