Accomplishments: Department of Physics and Astronomy
Physics and Astronomy graduate student John Boisvert, along with his advisor Jason Steffen and collaborator Ben Nelson were looking for planets hidden within archival data. There is an important degeneracy where a one-planet model produces the same signal as a two-planet model with a specific orbital configuration. This group developed…
Qiang Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) published an article, Predicting Phase Behavior of Grain Boundaries with Evolutionary Search and Machine Learning, in Nature Communications. The study of grain boundary phase transitions is an emerging field until recently dominated by experiments. Zhu, along with collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) has been awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Award, which recognizes and supports the early career development activities of teach-scholars who are considered most likely to become future academic leaders. The five-year, $593,489 grant was awarded to Zhu for his research on understanding how the…
Jeremy Smallwood (Astronomy), Sara Black (History), Tyler Stalbaum (Mechanical Engineering), and Cheryl Anderson (Anthropology) are the recipients of this year's Graduate College Outstanding Thesis & Dissertation Awards.
Each year the college gives four awards — within each category, one for STEM and one for non-STEM. This year’s winners are…
Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communications. The most important discovery in astronomy in 2017 was the groundbreaking discovery of a gravitational wave event GW170817 due to the merger of two neutron stars as well as its associated short GRB (gamma ray burst) 170817A and other…
Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) and a team of researchers recently published a paper in Nature Astronomy. The paper is titled, "Transition from Fireball to Poynting-flux-dominated Outflow in the Three-episode GRB 160625B," and was led by former UNLV Ph.D. student Bin-Bin Zhang.
In the paper, the research team discovered for the first…
Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) co-organized an Aspen Center for Physics conference titled, “Fast Radio Bursts: New Probes of Fundamental Physics and Cosmology” in February. The conference hosted approximately 80 scientists from around the world to discuss the nature of fast radio bursts, mysterious radio bursts discovered 10 years ago. The…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) has been named a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow. He is one of 126 researchers from 60 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada — and the first UNLV scientist — to be awarded the prestigious fellowship for early career scholars considered the ‘next generation of scientific leaders.’
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) was named a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow. He is one of 126 researchers from 60 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada – and the first UNLV scientist – to be awarded the prestigious fellowship. Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships honor early-career scholars…
Qiang Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) recently had a research paper published in Angewandte Chemie. The paper, titled "The Structure of Glycine Dihydrate: Implications for the Crystallization of Glycine from Solution and Its Structure in Outer Space," looks at long-term puzzling crystal structure determination of glycine at low…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) received a $444,188 grant from the NASA ATP (Astrophysics Theory Program) for Predicting Observational Signatures of Planet Formation in Realistic Models of Protoplanetary Disks .
He will hire a postdoc to be included in the research. The postdoc will work with Zhu and Jim Stone from…
Jason Steffen (Physics and Astronomy) will be a co-investigator on a $380,000 grant titled Architecture of Kepler's Multiple Planet Systems. He is working with Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center .
The project will study data from the NASA Kepler space mission to characterize the orbital properties of the thousands of…