Physics graduates Jade LeSchack, Elaine Taylor and Jeffrey Wack have received prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships, which recognize outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

This year’s awardees from the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) are:

• Dean Calhoun, Ph.D. student in atmospheric and oceanic science
• Zora Che, Ph.D. student in computer science
• Yuran Ding, Ph.D. student in computer science
• Ethan Heldtman (B.S. '24, atmospheric and oceanic science)
• Jade LeSchack (B.S. '25, physics; B.S. '25, mathematics), University of Southern California
• George Li (B.S. ’24, mathematics; B.S. ’24, computer science), Carnegie Mellon University
• Maria Nikolaitchik (B.S. '24, atmospheric and oceanic science; B.S. '24, mathematics)
• Tesia Shi (B.S. ’23, biological sciences; B.S. ’23, psychology)
• Jonathan Starfeldt, Ph.D. student in atmospheric and oceanic science
• Logan Stevens (B.S. '23, computer science, B.A. '23, theater), Ph.D. student in computer science at UMD
• Elaine Taylor (B.S. '23, physics and astronomy), Stanford University
• Jeffrey Wack (B.S. '22, physics; B.S. '22, mathematics), Caltech
• Adam Yang, computer science major
• Grant Yang (B.S. ’23, biological sciences), Harvard University
• Mary Yilma (B.S. ’21, mathematics; B.S. ’21, economics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program helps ensure the quality, vitality, and strength of the United States' scientific and engineering workforce. The five-year fellowships provide three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $37,000.

Since 1952, NSF has funded over 60,000 Graduate Research Fellowships out of more than 500,000 applicants. At least 42 fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates, and more than 450 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original story: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/15-nsf-graduate-research-fellowships-2025

Mohammad Hafezi has received a Humboldt Research Award, which acknowledges his history of impactful research and supports visiting Germany to collaborate with colleagues there. Each year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation gives the award, which is supported by the Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany, to no more than 100 researchers from around the world.

“I’m honored to receive this award,” says Hafezi, who is also a Minta Martin professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Maryland and a senior investigator at the National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation. “It's a great opportunity. The Humboldt Foundation has a long history of funding exceptional and interesting scientific work.”Mohammad Hafezi

Recipients of the award are academic researchers who can work in any discipline but who primarily live and work outside of Germany. Each candidate is nominated for consideration by a researcher at a German research institute, and the foundation selects recipients whose work has had a significant and lasting impact beyond their field of specialization.

Hafezi leads a research group that explores quantum behaviors resulting from the interplay of light and matter through both theoretical and experimental projects. His group tackles diverse topics like quantum optics and quantum simulation, which are vital to advancing quantum computing, sensing, and communication technologies. 

One subject Hafezi’s group is currently investigating is the physics of correlated electronic systems—materials and devices in which electrons are group players instead of individuals with independent quantum interactions. This line of research is building on decades of work investigating individual particles of light—photons—interacting with individual electrically-charged particles, often electrons. The physics of individual electrons interacting with light is utilized in a variety of technologies such as LEDs, laser projectors and quantum computers. But there is much more research to be explored, and potentially new technologies to invent, based on correlated electronic systems.

As part of the award, each recipient is invited to visit Germany and collaborate with colleagues at a German research institution. Hafezi is planning to use the opportunity to work in person with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, which is a global hub for cutting-edge research into correlated electronic systems. In particular, Angel Rubio and Andrea Cavalleri, who both work at the institute, are studying exciting topics like the nearly alchemical ability of light to make certain materials a superconductor or to make an existing superconductor more robust.

Together Hafezi and his colleagues in Hamburg will adapt and build on existing techniques and ideas, such as methods of using light to manipulate quantum states—quantum-optical control techniques—and frameworks from quantum information science developed to build quantum computers. Hafezi hopes that working together in person will produce ideas that they aren’t currently considering.

“I find it deeply compelling to investigate whether quantum-optical control techniques can be leveraged to probe, manipulate, and engineer correlated electronic systems in novel ways,” Hafezi says. “We may have to go back to the drawing board and then write things from first principles and come up with other models that can capture such many-body physics. So there is much work that has to be done.”

He says visiting Germany is an incredible opportunity for organic interactions that allow them to more easily connect and build on each other’s ideas.

“Nothing replaces in-person collaboration.” Hafezi says. “Given the fantastic theoretical work by Angel Rubio and the groundbreaking experimental research led by Andrea Cavalleri, I’m thrilled to deepen our collaboration and explore new directions together.”

Original story by Bailey Bedford: https://jqi.umd.edu/news/hafezi-receives-humboldt-research-award

Visiting Research Scientist and alumna Brenda Dingus (M.S. ’86, Ph.D. ’88, physics) has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her pioneering work in gamma-ray astrophysics. Brenda Dingus. Image courtesy of Andrew Smith.

Dingus is one of 120 members and 30 international members elected by their peers in 2025, joining a select group of 2,662 scientists around the country recognized for their influential research. She’s one of 26 current UMD faculty members in the National Academy of Sciences and is among 75 named to various esteemed honorary academies.

“This is an incredible honor,” Dingus said. “It is a wonderful recognition of the scientific importance of this new area of astronomy. Gamma-ray astrophysics is a very collaborative and interdisciplinary field, and I want to recognize and thank all the excellent scientists with whom I have had the pleasure to work.”

An astrophysicist who studies the highest-energy light from astrophysical sources, Dingus investigates how nature accelerates particles to extremely high energies, producing gamma rays in space that can be detected from Earth. She is best known for her work in developing innovative gamma-ray detectors and analyzing data to understand cosmic phenomena occurring in extreme environments such as around neutron stars and supermassive black holes.

“Brenda has been a true pioneer in particle astrophysics, with a remarkable breadth and depth of contributions that have profoundly shaped the field,” said Distinguished University Professor of Physics Jordan Goodman, a long-time collaborator who has worked with Dingus on several projects including the Cygnus air shower experiment in 1986. That experiment, conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to study the composition and energy of cosmic rays as they interacted with Earth’s atmosphere, laid the groundwork for future studies in the then-emerging field of cosmic and gamma-ray research.

After earning her Ph.D. from UMD in 1988 under the supervision of Gaurang Yodh, she spent seven years at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She then held tenured faculty positions at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a staff scientist in 2002. Dingus has been a visiting research scientist at UMD since 2020. 

Throughout her career, Dingus led the development of increasingly sophisticated instruments for detecting gamma rays from space and on Earth. Following her doctoral studies in experimental cosmic-ray physics at UMD, she contributed to the development and implementation of several instruments at NASA Goddard, including the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and its predecessor, the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) on NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite. Because lower-energy gamma rays cannot be detected on Earth’s surface, EGRET was specifically built to detect and gather data on lower-energy gamma rays in space. The project played a crucial role in mapping the Milky Way and detecting blazars (regions found in the center of galaxies that emit extremely powerful jets of radiation) and continues to influence NASA’s gamma-ray research.

Dingus at the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory in Mexico. Photo courtesy of Jordan Goodman.Dingus was also an instrumental member of the team responsible for the Milagro experiment, a NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation-funded project that used a water Cherenkov detector placed at high altitude to observe gamma rays from the ground. Milagro’s successor, the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory in Mexico, has identified more than 100 gamma-ray sources since it began operations in 2015, with Dingus serving as U.S. spokesperson, operations manager and principal investigator of the project. HAWC’s notable findings include the first detections of gamma rays exceeding 100 tera-electronvolts (TeV) and “microquasars,” rare binary star systems in which a black hole orbits a normal star. 

An elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, Dingus was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2000 and an Honorary Medal from the Mexican Physical Society in 2017. Over her 40-year career, Dingus has co-authored 249 publications, which have garnered over 24,000 citations. Dingus also served on numerous advisory committees to the American Physical Society, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

Dingus continues to work on cosmic- and gamma-ray instrumentation at UMD, collaborating with Goodman and physics research scientist Andrew Smith on the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory. Planned for construction in northern Chile in 2026, the observatory will detect air shower particles produced by gamma rays as they interact with Earth’s atmosphere and study extreme astrophysical phenomena, including gamma-ray bursts and supernova remnants. 

Original story by Georgia Jiang: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/umds-brenda-dingus-elected-national-academy-sciences