Biography

Sarah Eno received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. She has been a member of the AMY experiment at Tristan, the CDF and D0 experiments at FNAL, and the CMS experiment at the LHC. She is interested in studies of the weak force, studies of QCD using EWK vector bosons, searches for new particles, calorimeters, and radiation resistant scintillators. She is a fellow of the APS, has served on HEPAP and is a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Biography

Victor Galitski received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics under Prof. A. Larkin at the University of Minnesota after earning a Ph.D. in applied math (in a record 18 months)at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI). He joined UMD as an assistant professor in 2006. He has received a Simons Investigator Award, CMPS Board of Visitors Faculty Award, and an NSF Career Award. He recently finished translating from Russian to English a textbook, “Exploring Quantum Mechanics: A Collection of 700+ Solved Problems for Students, Lecturers, and Researchers" co-written by his grandfather, physicist V.M. Galitskii. He studies several subfields of condensed matter theory.

Biography

Sylvester James Gates Jr. holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science. During his decades with the UMD Department of Physics, he was named a Distinguished University Professor, University System of Maryland Regents Professor and John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. Known for his pioneering work in supersymmetry and supergravity, areas closely related to string theory, Gates was also an affiliate mathematics professor. Gates earned two Bachelor of Science degrees (in physics and mathematics) and his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1984, Gates co-authored Superspace: One Thousand and One Lessons in Supersymmetry, the first comprehensive book on supersymmetry, and joined the UMD faculty as an associate professor. Four years later, he became the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major U.S. research university.

The author of more than 200 research papers and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Gates has been featured in dozens of video documentaries, including five in 2015. For his contribution to science and research, he received the National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2013. Gates has served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the National Commission on Forensic Science, and the Maryland State Board of Education. He is a strong advocate for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. He has  served as president of both the National Society of Black Physicists and the American Physical Society.

PCAST Appointment by President Obama
Regents Professor Appointment by Chancellor Kirwan

Biography

Michelle Girvan received her B.S. in 1999 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in 2003 from Cornell University. Her research combines methods from statistical mechanics, dynamical systems, and graph theory to address interdisciplinary, network-related problems. She is interested in both broad theoretical approaches to complex networks as well as specific applications, especially to information cascades, epidemiology, and genetic regulatory networks.

In a 2019 podcast, she discussed her work in chaos and artificial intelligence.

In 2022, she was named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.