Boston University Physics News Archive: 2012

Andrew Duffy was named as the 2012 winner of the Metcalf Cup and Prize, the most prestigious teaching award of Boston University. It recognizes Andrew's accomplishments in teaching, pedagogical developments, and his positive influence on a large cadre of students. This award will be officially bestowed at the BU Commencement ceremonies on Sunday May 20.

Pankaj Mehta and co-author David Schwab's axiv paper "The Energetic Costs of Cellular Computation" has been highlighted by the MIT Technology Review Physics Arxiv Blog. The paper explores "what restrictions the theoretical limits of computation place on the way living things operate." For more, see the original paper or the synopsis from Technology Review.

Professor Anatoli Polkovnikov received a prestigious Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, together with 27 other distinguished physicists from USA and Canada for the 2012-2013 academic year. The purpose of the fellowship is to allow grantees to extend their sabbatical leaves to last for a full academic year.  The Simons Fellows Programs in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics was created to provide funds to faculty for up to a semester-long research leave from classroom teaching and administrative obligations.  Information about the Simons Fellowship program can be found at https://simonsfoundation.org/mps-funded-programs-simons-fellows-program.

The findings of Boston University physics department alumus Alexander Petersen and graduate student Joel Tenenbaum have been featured in Science News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and other news outlets. Their work draws statistical connections between business firms competing for market share and words “competing” for usage by speakers across three languages. They quantify the “tipping point”, at which an emerging word will go mainstream and show that significant historical events, such World War II and the founding of Israel, affect the way words “compete” with each other. The work is published in Scientific Reports at nature.com:

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120315/srep00313/full/srep00313.html

Congratulations to Martin Schmaltz, promoted to full professor. The full professor promotions were reported in BU Today. Quoting from the Dean's announcement:

Martin Schmaltz, CAS, Physics, specializes in theoretical particle physics, with a focus on extracting the fundamental physics underlying the results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. A widely respected author of dozens of papers and journal articles, he has emerged as one of the nation’s top experts in creating new hypotheses to extend the Standard Model of Particle Physics, hopefully to be tested by the LHC experiments.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the selection of 116 outstanding early career scientists, mathematicians, and economists as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows. Assistant Professor Tulika Bose was one of the recipients of the prestigious fellowship. Prof. Bose is presently stationed at CERN working on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

UPDATE: BU Today has posted an article congratulating Bose and two other BU Sloan Fellowship recipients.

Tulika Bose with students Cory Fantasia, David Sperka, and postdoc Aram Avetisyan

Profs. Ophelia Tsui and Andy Cohen become mother and father on January 14, 2012. They welcomed into the world their new son Kirin Lawrence Cohen with a mass of 2.95 kilograms. Everyone is doing well. Congratulations and best wishes!

Charles Hill and Sylvia Lewin, graduating seniors in the Physics Department, have been elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa by the Epsilon of Massachusetts Chapter at Boston University.  They join Lina Necib as electees to this meritorious organization.  Congratulations to all three students!