2024 Chair's Colloquium
As is our tradition, our first colloquium every Fall semester is given by our Department Chair, Distinguished Professor Chang Kee Jung. At this year's event on August 27, the Chair shared department news and accomplishments from the past year, along with an overview of the research done by members of the department.
Pictured above is the Department Chair with students in the Simons STEM Scholars Program.
You can find the slides from the Chair's Colloquium here.
Information about future colloquiums can be found on the Colloquium Page.
Bent Nielsen retires after 23 years of service
Bent came to Stony Brook in January 2001 joining Emilio Mendez's group. Bent served various research groups before becoming the Manager of the Instructional Lab in 2014 serving the department very well for the next 10 years. Bent was a member of the Neutrino and Nucleon decay (NN) group that received 2016 Breakthrough Prize for their contributions to the Super-Kamiokande, K2K and T2K experiments. Bent specifically contributed to the construction of the P0D detector for the T2K experiment.
After his retirement, Bent will continue his involvement in the department through his visiting scholar appointment. His broad experience and expertise with the Instructional Lab will be highly valuable for the department.
Congratulations to Bent for his well deserved retirement and we wish him the very best.
You can find more photos from Bent's retirement celebration here.
URECA Researcher of the Month: Alo Chakravarty
Congratulations to Alo Chakravarty for being named Researcher of the Month for August 2024!
Alo Chakravarty is a physics major in the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) honors program.
In her sophomore year (2023-2024), she began experimental high-energy/particle physics
research under the mentorship of Dr. John Hobbs (Department of Physics & Astronomy),
earning credit through PHY287: Introduction to Research. This summer, Alo had the
opportunity to continue her work and engage in full-time research through the Frances Velay Science Fellowship program funded by the Panaphil Foundation (Dr. Maria Nagan, CAS, Chemistry). In addition,
she was one of two Velay Fellows to be awarded the inaugural Physics & Astronomy Barish-URECA award, which provides additional support to undergraduate summer researchers.
Her project focuses on the analysis of an exotic Higgs decay pp → H → Za →bbμμ through data recorded with the ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC); and required learning to use ROOT, CERN’s data analysis framework used for high energy physics.
She uses Python, C++ and ROOT in her research to analyze data using machine learning techniques.
Alo will have the opportunity to present her first research poster, “Investigating the Exotic Higgs Boson Decay pp → H → Za → bbμμ with the Large Hadron Collider” at the Summer Symposium on August 2, along with ~100 other undergraduates involved in summer research programs. At Stony Brook, Alo enjoys being a tutor in the Academic Success and Tutoring Center;
she is also a member of the Society of Physics Students (SPS).
You can find more of the interview here.
Physics and Astronomy in the News
Stony Brook University Recognized as Leader in High School Physics Teacher Preparation
QIST Project Led by Stony Brook Selected for a NQVL Pilot Project
SUNY Honors Department Faculty Members
Remembering Jim Simons
Dr. Zamolodchikov Honored at 2024 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony
Dr. Deshpande Named BNL Interim Associate Lab Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics