The Physics World award for the 2013 Breakthrough of the Year goes to "the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory for making the first observations of cosmic neutrinos."
UMD contributors to the IceCube collaboration include Greg Sullivan and Kara Hoffman; faculty and staff members Erik Blaufuss, John Felde, Jordan Goodman, Henrike Wissing, Alex Olivas, Donald La Dieu, and Torsten Schmidt; and graduate students Elim Cheung, Robert Hellauer, Ryan Maunu, and Michael Richman.
Rabindra Mohapatra was chosen to serve on the editorial advisory board of Nuclear Physics B.
Professor Mohapatra is a Distinguished Scholar Teacher and researcher in our Elementary Particle group. He will serve on the board for three years.
Ellen Williams has been nominated by President Obama to the key administration post of Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, Department of Energy. ARPA-E was created to nurture high risk high payoff research that has the potential to make a large impact for the nation especially in the area of technology, jobs, energy, and sustainability.
The White House press release states that "Dr. Ellen D. Williams is the Chief Scientist for BP, a position she has held since 2010. She is currently on a leave of absence from the University of Maryland where she has served as a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology since 2000. Dr. Williams has served as a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland since 1991. She founded the University of Maryland Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and served as its Director from 1996 through 2009. Dr. Williams received a B.S. in Chemistry from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.”
Ellen will still be a member of the Department and IPST, on leave from the University.
Two popular press articles highlight a soon to be released Physical Reveiw Letter, co-authored by Ed Ott, regarding an electronic system that exhibits dragon kings. The articles, entitled Physicists Slay 'Dragon Kings and Using Chaos Theory to Predict and Prevent Catastrophic 'Dragon King' Events, appear in the latest issues of Physics World and Wired, respectively.
Professor Ed Ott has been awarded the 2014 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society. Unlike most APS awards, the Lilienfeld Prize recognizes an "outstanding contribution to physics by a single individual" regardless of sub-field. Professor Ott was cited for "pioneering contributions in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory that have been uniquely influential for physicists and scientists in many fields, and for communicating the beauty and unifying power of these concepts to remarkably diverse audiences."
Ed Ott
Professor Ott is a Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics and a member of our Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at The Cooper Union and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrophysics from Polytechnic University, then enjoyed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University. Returning stateside, he joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Cornell. He left Ithaca in 1979 to join the Department of Physics and Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, and has also held appointments at the Naval Research Lab and what is now the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 2011, he was named the Yuen Sang and Yu Yuen Kit So Endowed Professor of Non-linear Dynamics. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Early in his career, Professor Ott researched intense charged particle beams and the theory of plasmas. Here in College Park, he began to delve into chaos, including chaotic scattering; fast magnetic dynamos; fractals, transport, and Lagrangian chaos in fluids; control of chaos; fractal basin boundaries; communication with chaos; and transitions of the dynamics of chaotic systems.
He has published about 300 journal articles and written a well-regarded textbook, Chaos in Dynamical Systems. He is also an editor of Coping with Chaos, a collection of reprints that focuses on how scientists observe, quantify, and control chaos.
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