Distinguished University Professor James F. Drake has been selected for the John Adam Fleming Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The medal is awarded for original research and technical leadership in geomagnetism, atmospheric electricity, aeronomy, space physics, and/or related sciences. Drake was cited for pioneering theoretical investigations of space plasmas leading to discovery of fundamental properties and effects of magnetic reconnection.

James Drake

Drake received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and held appointments there before joining the University of Maryland as a postdoctoral associate in 1978. He became a full professor in 1990, jointly with the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology. At UMD, he has served as co-director of the Joint Space-Science Institute, a research partnership between the UMD Astronomy and Physics departments and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He was named a UMD Distinguished University Professor in 2014.  

Drake is a Fellow of the AGU and the American Physical Society, and in 2010, received the APS James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for pioneering investigations of plasma instabilities in magnetically-confined, astrophysical and laser-driven plasmas; in particular, explication of the fundamental mechanism of fast reconnection of magnetic fields in plasmas; and leadership in promoting plasma science.

He has also received the Popular Writing Award of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

During his career, Drake has investigated many aspects of plasma physics, including the solar corona, the earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere, magnetically confined plasma, and the interaction of intense lasers with plasma. He is now a co-Principal Investigator on the NASA Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission, which in 2024 came within 10 solar radii of the sun. Data from the PSP will help scientists determine the mechanism that heats the solar corona and drives the solar wind. Drake is also active in the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which is a four-satellite effort launched in 2015 to explore the physics of magnetic reconnection at exceedingly small spatial scales.

The Fleming Medal honors geophysicist John Adam Fleming (1877–1956), who made notable contributions to the establishment of magnetic standards. It will be awarded in December at the AGU’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California.

If you use a leading quantum computer today, you probably have Hanhee Paik (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, physics) to thank. 

The University of Maryland alum helped pioneer the transmon, a superconducting qubit that many quantum computing companies use today. For the past two decades, she’s been a quantum computing physicist, working on quantum processors and systems development—including helping build IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer in 2017. Hanhee Paik (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, physics) helped pioneer the transmon qubit and built IBM’s first 16-qubit quantum computer. Photo courtesy of Hanhee Paik

Now, as IBM’s superconducting quantum computers have surpassed 100 qubits, Paik leads initiatives to help researchers find impactful ways to use them. In March 2025, she became a director of IBM’s Quantum Algorithm Centers and Academic Collaboration Program at IBM Research, where she works with universities and research institutions around the world to develop new ways to use quantum computers to solve challenging computational problems. These scientific algorithms and applications are already yielding breakthroughs that seemed impossible a decade ago. 

“The IBM Quantum team's mission is to build a useful quantum computer. This year, IBM announced three examples of quantum advantage we achieved with our partners, which show the current state-of-the-art quantum computing systems solving some scientific problems faster, cheaper or easier.” Paik said. “For certain scientific computations, quantum computers are already useful right now.” 

From superconductivity to quantum computers

When Paik first arrived at UMD from South Korea, she didn’t plan to study quantum physics. She came to research superconductivity with Physics Professors Emeriti Frederick Wellstood and Christopher Lobb.

Around that time, Wellstood and Lobb began researching how to use superconductors to build qubits—the basic unit of computation for quantum computers. Quantum computers process information using quantum properties—like the ability to exist in a “superposition” of multiple states, or “entanglement,” where two or more qubits become deeply interconnected so that each qubit state cannot be described independently—making them powerful.

Paik became interested in the work, and her dissertation at UMD tackled a central challenge in the field called decoherence—a process in which the outside environment causes qubits to lose their quantum properties. For quantum computers to be useful, coherence is key: The longer qubits can maintain their quantum states, the more time users have to perform calculations. Paik’s Ph.D. research at UMD developed new designs and materials to improve coherence time for superconducting qubits. 

She continued that work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences and Yale University. At Yale, she helped improve the coherence of the transmon qubit—which was a superconducting qubit with one of the longest coherence times at the time but still too short for useful quantum computation.

Paik’s research revealed that transmons decohered quickly because they lost energy to surfaces and interfaces. She engineered a new transmon qubit architecture that lessened this energy loss by tweaking where energy is stored and improved transmon coherence times 100-fold. That qubit architecture became—and remains—the standard for quantum computers built by major companies, including IBM.

“That was the jumping-out-of-the-box moment for quantum computing,” Paik said. “That design is still the canonical design that everyone uses for transmons today.” 

Building a ‘useful’ quantum computer at IBM 

Shortly after her postdoctoral appointment ended at Yale, Paik joined IBM in 2014 as a senior research scientist, where she continued transmon qubit research. She helped construct the company’s first 16-qubit computer in 2017. Named ibm_albatross, this was the first superconducting quantum processor of more than 10 qubits. 

As quantum computers grew larger and more powerful, Paik saw another challenge emerging: to discover algorithms for the use of quantum computers. 

“I’d been building quantum computers for almost my entire career, and now that they were becoming more and more useful for addressing scientific problems, I thought I’d really like to try using them,” Paik said. “Even if you build one of the best computers in the world, if no one knows how to use it—if you don’t have algorithms to use your computing system in the best way—it’s not very useful.”

So, Paik joined the office of then-vice president of IBM Quantum and quantum algorithms expert Jay Gambetta as chief of staff, supporting the technical and business side of his operations. She further developed her business skills as a technical business development executive in 2023 and then moved to Japan for an assignment to organize the IBM Quantum Japan team in 2024 before assuming her current role in Chicago.

Progress has surged since then. This year, researchers at Cleveland Clinic, IBM and RIKEN successfully modeled a 12,635-atom protein complex—the largest ever simulated by quantum computers—using a hybrid approach of integrated quantum and high-performance computing (HPC). Known as quantum-centric supercomputing, this new computing architecture allows each form of computing to perform the tasks it does best. The researchers say it’s a promising advancement that will allow breakthroughs in many practical problems such as drug discovery, and for Paik, it signals an exciting future integrating quantum and HPC. 

“That’s what’s most exciting to me at the moment,” Paik said. “It’s quantum-centric supercomputing and its potential to solve many of the most challenging computational problems that are currently intractable.” 

As Paik helps to advance IBM’s quantum technology and business toward that future, she’s tapping back into lessons from UMD. For her, the most cherished learnings from graduate school weren’t technical skills, but values. She credits her Ph.D. advisors for modeling persistence, thoroughness and sincerity—qualities she brings to her own work and mentorship. 

“I learned a lot from both Fred and Chris that helped me become a good scientist,” Paik said. “I am living their legacy, trying to represent what I learned from them.”

She also seeks to recreate the sense of community she experienced at UMD, where students could interact freely and casually with researchers at the forefront of physics. She still remembers Nobel Laureate William Phillips having lunch with students after Joint Quantum Institute seminars—making a connection that left a lasting impression.

“At UMD, people were so nice and supportive. They provided unwavering support to help young students unleash their full potential.” Paik said. “That sense of community is really important to experience at an early age—especially as a student. It sets your view on life. I treasure those values and want to live them out.”

Original story by Jason P. Dinh: UMD Alum Hanhee Paik Helps to Shape the Future of Quantum Computing at IBM | College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences | University of Maryland

John Biddle (Ph.D. ’13, physics) is often inspired by a challenging problem at work: How do you locate, identify or inspect something that you can’t actually see?

“It’s something that’s very interesting to me—how do you learn something about a particular thing without necessarily seeing it? How can you look inside a box without ever opening it or figure out what's under the ground,” he said. “It’s very interesting exploring the technologies you can use to see things and testing the different types of sensors that are out there to see if you can get them to work.”John Biddle

Biddle is the senior scientist at Spectrohm, a McLean, Virginia tech startup where he’s developing smarter sensing technologies that can ‘see’ inside everything from shipping boxes to backpacks. The company aims to disrupt the screening and inspection industry by providing a safe, cost-effective way to screen the billions of cargo containers, e-commerce packages and personal items that travel worldwide every year but often go uninspected. 

Instead of X-rays or manual searches, Spectrohm’s unique approach uses radio frequency imaging technology paired with artificial intelligence to rapidly inspect packages and identify prohibited or dangerous contents—imagine a system that can scan a backpack crammed full of stuff and quickly determine whether the liquid in a plastic bottle inside is water, milk or gasoline. 

“We’re piloting a system called CheckStream, and that system would be used to look at, say, a backpack or a bag, identify what’s in it and decide whether there is a threat inside it or not,” Biddle explained. “Another system called CargoStream is for applications like mail and package screening, cargo and commercial inspection, and that’s our more advanced system that’s basically creating internal images of what’s inside.”

The goal is to create problem-solving automated sensing systems that are safe, cost-effective and user-friendly. 

“There are a lot of packages that are sent around the world that are allowed to go through without actually being checked, because there are so many and the cost of going through all of them would be pretty high with current technology,” Biddle said. “We’re trying to lower that barrier to make the screening process easier.”

Discovering the beauty of physics

Growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Biddle was an inquisitive kid who competed in math contests and tinkered with Radio Shack electronics kits. His fascination with science took him all the way to Harvard, where, as an undergraduate, he discovered the beauty of physics.  

“I think it was when I first took my electricity and magnetism courses, where I thought, wow, this is really cool stuff. Once you kind of get past that initial barrier of entry, you can see things that look kind of beautiful; you also see how so many things can be explained with just very few first principles,” he said. “That really intrigued me.”

In 2004, after graduating with a degree in physics and electrical engineering, Biddle landed a position as a research associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit Washington, D.C. think tank, where he got his first introduction to sensing technology.

“I landed in the science and technology division, where they were consulting about acquiring new technologies,” Biddle said. “At the time, there was a big focus on landmines and improvised explosive devices, so there were plenty of new technologies claiming they could either detect or mitigate these threats. And the question for us was how could we test to see if these technologies work.”

In 2006, inspired by the colleagues with physics doctorates he worked with at IDA—including many who studied at the University of Maryland—Biddle decided to take his physics education to the next level. He began his graduate work in condensed matter physics at UMD, exploring Anderson localization and quasi-disordered systems and doing innovative research with his advisor, Distinguished University Professor Sankar Das Sarma.

“He was well-known in the field, and what was great was that he was on top of a lot of different topics, so he always had a good sense of the next big thing people were working on,” Biddle recalled. “I would typically do a lot of research on my own and then come back and do a gut check with him. And then, at some point, he’d say, ‘Okay, we're at the point where I think this is going to turn into a publication.’ So, I had three or four research publications during that time.”

‘It’s cutting-edge research, and it’s fun’

After earning his Ph.D., Biddle joined IDA’s research team full time, continuing his work with sensing systems.

“I looked at a wide range of different sensing technologies like ground-penetrating radar, metal detection and acoustics to see how accurately they could identify what’s underground or what’s inside a package,” he explained. “I enjoyed the challenge.”

Then one night in 2019, a decision to attend a D.C. Tech Meetup event opened the door to a whole new opportunity.

“The founder of Spectrohm and I happened to sit next to each other,” Biddle explained, “and it was one of those things where the person next to you turns to you and says, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I'm a physics Ph.D., and I've been working on sensing technology. And he was like, ‘Really? I happen to be working on sensor technology too.’ The rest is history.”

In 2021, Biddle made the move to Spectrohm, and since then, he’s been drawing from his physics background and sensing experience to work on the company’s high-speed inspection systems, applying his scientific skills in ways he would have never envisioned a decade ago.

“There's a lot of applied physics because I'm doing lots of electricity and magnetism modeling. We have to turn these signals from the sensing technology into something that’s human-interpretable. So that involves taking certain sensors, having a model for how we think the sensors will respond and then doing essentially an inverse problem—we have a sensor output, so what can we say about what's inside the portal,” Biddle explained. “They’re hard problems, but it's cutting-edge research, and it's fun.”

And Biddle believes they’re just scratching the surface of what these innovative sensing technologies can do.

“There could be plenty of applications,” Biddle said, “like security situations where you have people coming in with bags and backpacks, but you want to check to make sure their bags don't have a threat without using very cumbersome technology like X-rays. Or for logistics, if you have a lot of products going down the assembly line, and you want to check to make sure things are okay without manually inspecting every single item on the line. Our technology can do that.”

As Spectrohm’s products begin to enter the marketplace, Biddle still sees more testing and problem-solving on the road ahead. But it’s work he enjoys, science that’s challenging and especially meaningful because he’s making a difference. 

“There’s definitely something rewarding about this work, and it's not just seeing the research come to fruition,” he said. “Most of all, seeing your work turn into an actual product and being able to say, ‘We made that,’ that’s very cool. Having that kind of impact, making something that makes someone's life easier or solves a problem—it’s great.” 

Fifty years ago, long before he gained international recognition and “hero” status for his contributions to gravitational wave theory and the game-changing Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), Richard Isaacson (Ph.D. ’67, physics) had one of his most memorable adventures as a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland: traveling to his first scientific conference and “surviving the experience” of giving his first research talk to an audience of legendary scientists.

“I knew I was going to be talking to some noteworthy scientists. One of the people who was there was Peter Bergmann, a physicist who was an assistant to Albert Einstein, and he was very influential in the field. I knew all these people were going to ask me about my little calculations. Could I withstand the questions, the probing from every wild direction? It was my first big exposure,” Isaacson recalled. “I had gone and sat in the audience at conferences before, but that was very different from this. And, you know, it wasn't terrifying; it was an incredibly valuable experience.”

Now half a century later, Isaacson is supporting a new generation of graduate students taking on the challenges of gravitational physics while honoring the mentor whose “encouragement, enthusiasm, intellectual breadth, mathematical analytic facilities and vision [provided] the intellectual foundations and audacity” for his success. With a generous gift, Isaacson established the Richard Isaacson Graduate Student Travel Award in Gravitational Physics in memory of Physics Professor Charles Misner, the gravitational theorist who inspired Isaacson—and an entire generation of physics students—at UMD.

“Misner was awfully impressive. He had a joy of doing research and of probing the unknown and learning about it that he communicated to his students, and he was enormously helpful and influential,” Isaacson said. “My own reaction was that I held him in awe. I think he would be delighted that I’m remembering him this way, and I think he would certainly approve.”

Isaacson’s gift supports Forward: The University of Maryland Campaign for the Fearless, a $2.5 billion fundraising initiative that aims to expand access to UMD’s world-class education, accelerate groundbreaking research and build stronger communities. 

His philanthropy also leverages the college's Bequest Legacy Challenge, an incentive program that provides an immediate cash match for donors who document new or increased planned commitments to the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.

“The department is very proud of our foundational role in the development of gravitational wave theory and its experimental confirmation.  I was delighted to learn of the role one of our alumni, Dr. Isaacson, played in that discovery,” said Kara Hoffman, professor and chair of the Department of Physics. “Charlie Misner was certainly a luminary, and I can’t think of a more appropriate way to honor his memory.  We are humbled by this gift.”

For IsaacsRichard Isaacsonon, it’s all about giving something back to the place that gave so much to him.

“I’m at a stage of life where I think things now have a different perspective and priority. So, I started thinking about that, and I realized that I'd like to pay back a bit, for the experience that changed my life at Maryland,” he explained. “I'm not in the multi-millionaire or billionaire class, but I thought that in today’s uncertain and rapidly changing environment for basic research I could do something, at least, that could help students out in a field which is now flourishing, and I think will do so for the next 50 years.”

Making academic dreams a reality

Isaacson came from a working-class family, and support from scholarships and graduate fellowships helped make his academic dreams a reality. His generous gift to UMD will support graduate students studying gravitational physics, funding travel awards that will allow them to attend scientific meetings and conferences, present their research and expand their graduate experience.

“It's not just to give them the enjoyment of going to a conference. It's to enable them to do something to help their career, to get out and meet people and spread the word about what they're doing, and so it gives them a little extra push,” he said. “That was something I appreciated as a graduate student, and I think I'd like to continue the tradition.”

When Isaacson began his Ph.D. research on gravitational waves, inspired by some of Einstein’s most fascinating theories, he had no idea where the work would take him. What he did know was that UMD was a widely recognized leader in the field, one of a very few U.S. institutions where gravitational work was being done both theoretically and experimentally. With Misner’s support and mentorship, Isaacson studied how gravitational waves behave and how they might be measured, answering some critical questions along the way.

“I think my thesis contributed to making it very simple and clear how these waves propagated and how in many ways they were like light,” he said. “So, it opened up a new experimental realm and made clear that this was going to be an interesting way to explore the universe.”

Advancing science ‘by a hundred years’

Isaacson went on to teach at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Then in 1973 he became the founding program director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) gravitational physics program, where he was soon reviewing the plan for the massive LIGO project, a bold experiment aimed at detecting gravitational waves using lasers. For decades, Isaacson worked tirelessly, securing funding and support to make sure LIGO became a reality. 

“You know, it was just this extraordinary opportunity, and I was crazy enough not to know what would be involved,” Isaacson reflected. “I'm one of an army of a thousand scientists who were involved in the project, and we had a totally different Congress that had a view of the future and could take risks and were willing to go for it,” Isaacson said. “I think Einstein said something like ‘You have to choose a problem outside of your reach—not outside of your grip, but not beyond your reach.’ This was definitely a stretch, but it was a miraculous time, and we could do that stretch.”

On September 14, 2015, two LIGO facilities did something that had never been done before—they succeeded in detecting gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two black holes. Since then, the project has yielded a host of other groundbreaking discoveries in the U.S. and around the world.Richard Isaacson's UMD ID card from the 1960s.

“I certainly knew that as soon as they got something working to detect these gravitational waves and even more spectacularly, prove the existence of black holes, it would change everything,” Isaacson said. “We advanced science by a hundred years.”

Isaacson was honored by the American Physical Society in 2018 with the establishment of the Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science, recognizing outstanding contributions in gravitational-wave physics, gravitational-wave astrophysics and the technologies that enable this science. Meanwhile, UMD’s influence in gravitational research continues today, with alumni and faculty members engaged in the LIGO project and related work. Looking ahead, Isaacson hopes his gift can help take gravitational physics—and the students who study it—into the future.

“Supporting students in the gravitational physics group, that's the highest priority of this, to keep this field strong. Every brick that you can put in helps build the wall,” Isaacson said. “I hope I can help these young students, pay something back for the opportunities I’ve had and keep science alive.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Physicists Nicholas Butch, Michael Gullans and William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be honored with awards for their federal service.  Butch and Gullans will receive Arthur S. Flemming Awards for exceptional civil service while pursuing basic science. Phillips will receive the Katharine B. Gebbie Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Federal Service. 

Butch, an experimentalist working with the UMD Quantum Materials Center, studies novel electron interactions in materials. He received hiNicholas Butchs Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and joined NIST's  Center for Neutron Research in 2013. He was appointed to an adjunct position in the Department of Physics that same year.  Among his other honors are Fellowship in the American Physical Society, the NIST Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the NIST Sigma Xi Katharine Gebbie Young Investigator Award.

Gullans, a physicist in NIST's Nanoscale Device Characterization Division and a Fellow of the Michael GullansJoint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), studies the theoretical realm of quantum information systems and quantum simulators in nonperturbative and strongly-interacting limits.  He is the deputy director of the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation. Gullans received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He held postdoctoral appointments at UMD and Princeton University. 

Phillips, a Distinguished University Professor and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute, joined NIST in 1978 after receiving hisWilliam D. Phillips Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His awards include the 1997 Nobel Prize (with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji) for "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”. He was first cited with the Gebbie award in 2020, but conferral was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The award honors and recalls Katharine Gebbie, founding Director of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory.

Butch, Gullans and Phillips will be honored on November 8, 2026 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.