PhysPhest is a celebration of the research being conducted in the Physics Department by M.Sc. and Ph.D. students who are completing their first year in the program. This year, PhysPhest was held on September 7th with 11 students presenting their research to the department in a series of short (~ 12 - 15 minute) talks. The best speakers were selected by the general audience (48 votes).
The top speakers for 2016 are:
The winners of the CPES Undergraduate Poster Session, which was held on August 5th, 2016, are:
Christina Burbadge was awarded first prize in the student poster competition at the Direct Reaction with Exotic Beams (DREB2016) conference held in Halifax July 11 - 15. Her poster presentation, titled "Investigating the nature of excited 0+ states populated via the 162Er(p,t) reaction" was selected by an international panel of judges as the best poster presented by a student. The DREB conference, held every 2 years, is the premier international conference in the field of reactions with rare isotope beams.
Calvin Tabert has been awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal for outstanding achievement at the graduate level. Calvin completed his MSc and PhD in the quantum materials group of Prof. Elisabeth Nicol. The citation for his award summarizes Calvin's remarkable achievements and is given below:
Congratulations to Christina Burbadge who placed second for Best Paper Presentation Prize in the Nuclear Physics Division for her presentation of her paper titled "Investigating the nature of excited 0+ states populated via the 162Er(p,t) reaction" at the 2016 CAP Congress. Christina is leading the analysis of data obtained from the MLL facility in Munich, Germany, by the collaboration involving Guelph, TRIUMF, the Technical University Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, and the University of Western Cape (South Africa).
Prof. Alex Gezerlis has been awarded a Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) in the latest NSERC competition. The award, valued at $120k over 3 years, provides additional resources to promote research programs that have been highly rated in terms of their originality and innovation, and to the researcher who shows extraordinary potential to become an international leader in their field. NSERC provides a maximum number of 125 DAS awards per year, and the University of Guelph receives 1 - 3 such awards annually.
On October 6, 2015 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita, Super-Kamiokande Collaboration University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan and Arthur B. McDonald, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. They were awarded “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.