The Physics & Astronomy Department is proud to announce that the following department-sponsored physics majors were invited to join the national honor society Phi Beta Kappa for 2022-2023. Via donations from faculty, the department paid the one-time membership dues for all the students. We'd like to congratulate all of the invited students and commemorate their efforts with a few words from their respective professors and mentors:

The Tuesday May 23 general meeting of the Mount Diablo Astronomical Society will feature Professor Lloyd Knox speaking about "Cepheids, Supernovae, and the Cosmic Microwave Background." This event will be shared on YouTube. More information can be found here.

Professor Maxwell Chertok is spending the spring as a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, UK. Performing ground-breaking research in particle physics at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, both the Bristol and UC Davis groups had a hand in the monumental Higgs boson discovery back in 2012.

Congratulations to our 2022-2023 undergraduate award winners!

Best in Show! Congratulations to our Physics Club for winning the Best in Show award for their R-Ohm-eo and Joule-iet performance complete with physics demos.

UC Davis physics adjunct professor Kai Liu was elected to the rank of NAI Fellow, citing his demonstrated “highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.” Professor Liu, currently with Georgetown University, was professor of physics at UC Davis from 2001 to 2019.

Physics professor Robin Erbacher is one of seven UC Davis faculty members recognized among the top female scientists around the globe, as assessed by Research.com in its first ranking of the "Best Female Scientists in the World"

Zhen Pan, the Zel'dovich Fellow at the Perimeter Institute and former PhD student advised by Professor Lloyd Knox, will be joining the faculty of the T. D. Lee Institute, a new institute in Shanghai, China affiliated with Shanghai Jiaotong University. Although Dr. Pan's appointment does not start until the coming summer, he has already secured a research grant and is looking to hire two postdoctoral scholars.