News
May 1, 2023
Brandeis Professor Emeritus of Physics Stanley Deser passed away in Pasadena CA on Friday April 21, 2023. He joined the faculty of the Physics Deptartment at Brandeis in 1958, where he remained until he retired in 2005. Stanley was a towering figure in theoretical high energy physics, classical gravity, and quantum gravity.
April 27, 2023
The Michael L. Walzer '56 Award for Teaching is given annually to a tenure-track faculty member who combines superlative scholarship with inspired teaching. A student noted that "Professor Rogers manages to understand the demographic of the course of mostly biology and/or pre-med students and still inspire interest in the subject and not discourage students with complex study material. The way he teaches is phenomenal."
February 21, 2023
January 18, 2023
Rosner is an eminent theoretical physicist and the new 2023 APS President, and his love for the field stretches back to childhood. “I loved puzzles; I always read science articles, books,” he says. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Brandeis and his doctorate from Harvard and has been at the University of Chicago since 1987. He doesn't remember a time when he didn't love science. He notes that majoring in Physics at Brandeis "was an amazing experience for me."
See his APS February 2023 interview here.
April 29, 2022
On Friday, April 29, a portrait of Albert Einstein by Ukrainian Artist Tetyana Kolechko will be hung in the Abelson hallway. This portrait was generously donated by Dr. Natalya Proskura and Vladislav Shapiro (MS '93). Their son Michael Proskura is a member of the Brandeis Class of 2024.
May 6, 2021
Brandeis Professor Emeritus of Physics, Stanley Deser, has been elected as a Foreign Member to the Royal Society. The Royal Society is a fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Its fundamental purpose is to recognize, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.
Deser is one of about 180 current Foreign Members in all fields of science. In addition, he is one of only four theoretical physicists elected.
Photo Credit: EHT Collaboration
March 24, 2021
Professor John Wardle explains the significance of a new image of a black hole's magnetic fields.
February 18, 2021
Researchers at the Brandeis Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), led by Guillaume Duclos, Seth Fraden, Michael Hagan and Aparna Baskaran, are harnessing the power of swirling cellular proteins to create self-propelling fluids.
November 24, 2020
Brandeis physicist Bulbul Chakraborty has been named a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Chakraborty, the Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics and head of the Division of Science, received the prestigious recognition for important theoretical contributions to diverse areas of condensed matter physics, particularly disordered systems including frustrated magnets and granular materials.
Photo Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
October 7, 2020
Sarkar, who received his PhD working with Professor Bulbul Chakraborty, is the recipient of the 2021 Irwin Oppenheimer award from the American Physical Society. Prsently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The award recognizes outstanding contributions to physics by early career scientists who publish in Physical Review E (PRE). The citation that will appear on the certificate is: “For developing a theory of the emergence of self-replication in simple chemical models, and the definition of general design principles for constructing self-replicating objects.”
MRSEC harnesses the power of organic matter to develop new materials and machines.
July 14, 2020
Brandeis' MRSEC program, which is developing revolutionary new types of nano-sized machines and materials, has received an $18 million, six-year grant from the National Science Foundation.
It is the third time Brandeis has received the prestigious award. This year it was given to only 10 other universities besides Brandeis, including Columbia, Harvard and Princeton.
April 2, 2020
Professor W. Benjamin Rogers has been awarded a 2020 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) collaborative Program Grant to create a self-propagating synthetic cell. The HFSP Program Grants aim to tackle big questions in the life sciences by supporting and bringing together researchers with different backgrounds from different countries.
Photo Credit: CERN
March 27, 2020
Prajita Bhattarai, a Physics graduate student who spent last summer at CERN, has received an ATLAS PhD grant to allow her to focus on her research measuring Higgs-boson decays into four-lepton final states.
Photo Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
October 2, 2019
Professor of astrophysics John Wardle, an expert on radio astronomy, is part of the consortium that captured an image of a supermassive black hole for the first time in history.
Photo Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
April 10, 2019
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. Physicist John Wardle, who was part of the team that produced the image, explains why it's a major scientific breakthrough.
February 19, 2019
Brandeis University has received a $20,000 grant from the Association of American Universities (AAU) to complement and enhance current efforts at the university to foster student success in STEM.
January 18, 2019
Brandeis physicist Seth Fraden explains what active matter is and how it can be used to create machines and materials that behave like living organisms.
November 20, 2018
Associate Professor of Physics Aparna Baskaran has won a 2019 Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research from the American Physical Society.
November 16, 2018
Matthew Headrick explains what a mind-blowing theory in physics, the idea that the universe is a hologram.
October 12, 2018
We don't know for sure because we've never been able to take a picture of one. That may all be about to change.
July 25, 2018
The Provost's Office has announced this year's recipients of the Provost Research Awards, given to support innovations in teaching and research at Brandeis. Physics awardees include:
Baptiste Blanc (Physics), "Chemo-mechanical gel actuated by an oscillating chemical reaction"; An Huang (Mathematics) and Bogdan Stoica (Physics), "Physics from the primes"; Shashank Shekhar (Biochemistry, Biology, Physics), "Developing Stentor coeroelous as a new model organism to study the physical basis for evolution of multicellularity and organismal size-regulation."
June 8, 2018
Physicist Seth Fraden is developing a new generation of machines modeled on living creatures. His latest invention might one day treat disease by swimming its way through our blood.
Summer 2018
Professor of Physics Matthew Headrick researches one of the most cutting-edge ideas in theoretical physics. It proposes that the universe is a three-dimensional image projected off a two-dimensional surface, much like a hologram emerges from a sheet of photographic film.
April 4, 2018
Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics Bulbul Chakraborty has received a prestigious fellowship in theoretical physics from the Simons Foundation in New York.
Summer 2017
Under a $20 million Materials Research Science and Engineering Center grant, Brandeis physicists are creating “active” matter that could one day animate self-healing artificial organs, drug-delivering nanobots and self-mending clothes.