People News

JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi was announced as a recipient of a 2015 ONR Young Investigator award. ONR's website describes the program as being designed to promote the professional development of early-career academic scientists – called investigators, or YIPs – both as researchers and instructors. For awardees, the funding supports laboratory equipment, graduate student stipends and scholarships, and other expenses critical to ongoing and planned investigational studies.

Despite cold weather and cloudy skies, UMD's annual Maryland Day (April 25, 2015) attracted thousands of visitors eager to learn about the university. The JQI was again located on the lawn outside the Physics Building, and provided fun examples and analogs of quantum topics with demonstrations of parametric down conversion, wave-particle duality, charged dust traps, and the Meissner effect. The JQI thanks all of our volunteers for their hard work in making this day possible!

Photo credits: The JQI and University of Maryland Physics Department

The OSA announced JQI Fellow and NIST scientist Paul Julienne as the 2015 William F. Meggers Award recipient. The William F. Meggers Award recognizes outstanding work in spectroscopy. According to the citation, Julienne is being recognized for "seminal contributions to precision photoassociation and magnetic-Feshbach spectroscopy of ultracold atoms, and the application of these techniques to the formation of cold polar molecules."