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Katharine Gebbie: 1932-2016

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Category: Department News
Published: Thursday, August 18 2016 17:08

Katharine Gebbie, founding Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), died on August 17, 2016.

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Katharine spent her career at NIST, where she oversaw the work that led to four Nobel Prizes in Physics (Bill Phillips, Eric Cornell, Jan Hall, and Dave Wineland).  This achievement was directly due to her management style,
which placed the science and scientists above all else. In her words, "get the best people, steer them in the right direction, give them the resources they need and let them run.” 

She was a fascinating individual, the niece of Katharine Blodgett, of
Langmuir-Blodgett film renown.  Katharine credited her aunt with inspiring her devotion to science.  She received a PhD in astrophysics from University College (London), and joined NIST in Boulder as a postdoc.  She moved to Gaithersburg in the late 80’s and was the only director of the Physics Lab, which was in existence for 20 years.

In addition to her special role at NIST, she had a deep and important relationship with UMD Physics.  The existence of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) is in large part due to Katharine.  She had seen first hand the success of JILA in Boulder and was enthusiastically encouraging and supported the creation of the JQI in 2006. 

In addition to her connection to the department through the JQI, she was dedicated to working to increase the opportunities in physics for women and under-represented minorities.  She was a co-organizer with Donna Hammer and Angie Hight Walker, from NIST, of a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics in 2014, which brought over one hundred undergraduate female physics majors to campus.  With Donna and Angie, she was working on a Conference for Undergraduate Minorities in Physics to be held this October, which will be the first of its kind in the country.

Everyone who knew Katharine will miss her and her wry sense of humor.  She was a special individual.


Gates Awarded a Wilson H. Elkins Professorship

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Category: Department News
Published: Tuesday, August 16 2016 13:05

Sylvester James "Jim" Gates, Jr. was awarded the 2017 Wilson H. Elkins Professorship from the University System of Maryland (USM). The Elkins Professorships support professors and researchers who demonstrate exemplary ability to inspire students and whose professional work and scholarly endeavors make a positive impact at their institutions, across the USM, and beyond.

Gates, known for his work in supersymmetry and supergravity, was chosen for his "seminal research in his Center for Particle and String Theory and engaging students in that research."

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Mohapatra, Ji Named Distinguished University Professors

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Category: Department News
Published: Friday, August 12 2016 12:54

Professors Rabi Mohapatra and Xiangdong Ji have been named University of Maryland Distinguished University Professors. This designation is the campus’ highest academic honor, reserved for those whose scholarly achievements “have brought distinction to the University of Maryland.”

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Rabi Mohapatra is renowned for his seminal contributions to elementary particle physics. Over the last five decades, his ideas have been critical in developing new directions, often inspiring new classes of experiments. He is the author of more than 400 published papers, which have been referenced more than 30,000 times. Professor Mohapatra has also played a leadership role within the particle physics community, mentoring younger scientists, writing important textbooks, and serving on committees that have charted the direction of the field.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1969, under the guidance of Robert Marshak and Susumu Okubo. In his thesis he argued that the very small mass differences among kaon particles required the existence of one or more new particles with masses less than 4 GeV. This prediction was later spectacularly confirmed with the discovery of the charm quark with mass 1.5 GeV in 1974. He was a co-inventor of the Seesaw mechanism for understanding small neutrino masses, which he proposed in 1979.

Prof. Mohapatra had postdoctoral appointments at Stony Brook University and the University of Maryland. He is well-known for being one of the co-proponents of the left-right symmetric theories of weak interactions, proposed as a Maryland post-doc in 1974. He joined the City College of New York as an assistant professor that year, and returned to the University of Maryland as a full professor in 1983. He is an acknowledged leader in neutrino physics.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Indian Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Prize and a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

JiJi

Xiangdong Ji has flourished in both theoretical Quantum Chromodynamics and experimental dark matter research. He received the American Physical Society's 2016 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics "For pioneering work in developing tools to characterize the structure of the nucleon within QCD and for showing how its properties can be probed through experiments; this work not only illuminates the nucleon theoretically but also acts as a driver of experimental programs worldwide."

With visiting appointments at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Peking University, he has built and led the PandaX experiment, a 125kg-liquid xenon detector in the China Jinping underground lab, searching for dark matter. A 550 kg detector, PandaX 2, has just produced the world's most sensitive limit on the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.

Prof. Ji received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Drexel University, and then served as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the University of Maryland in 1996. He received the Jefferson Science Associates' 2015 Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award, the 2014 Alexander von Humboldt Prize and the 2004 Distinguished Overseas Young Scientist Award of the National Science Foundation of China. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

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