Father Thaddeus J. Burch passed away May 14, 2024 in Wauwatosa, WI. He was 93 years old, a Jesuit for 75 years and a priest for 62 years. His life combined his deep religious faith with a quest and appreciation for the world of physics. In addition to his two bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and theology, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics and then a PhD at Fordham University. His PhD thesis on “A Nuclear Resonance Study of Order-Disorder in Ferromagnetic Alloys” was completed in 1968 under the direction of Professor Joseph Budnick. In 1974, Joe left Fordham to become the department chair in physics at the University of Connecticut and Thaddeus joined him as a visiting professor and a member of the Institute of Materials Sciences from 1974 to 1976. The research they completed together over the years led to 41 peer-reviewed journal articles that used NMR to probe ferromagnetic materials. Father Burch later joined Marquette University and was a professor of physics, physics department chair, and dean of the graduate school. Professor Budnick remembers Father Burch as “a dedicated and gifted student at Fordham and a creative and interactive researcher in the lab. He was a genuinely wonderful person in every way.”
Month: July 2024
Prof. Moshe Gai Awarded 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award
Professor Moshe Gai, the director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, aka the Astrophysics Laboratory, https://astro.uconn.edu, was awarded a 2024-2025 Fulbright US Scholar Award to teach and do research in Romania. He will spend five months at the newly constructed world highest power laser lab (10 PW), the Extreme Light Infrastructure Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP), recently constructed by the EU in Bucharest, where Prof. Gai plans to apply expertise he gained working at Duke University for using Time Projection Chamber (TPC) detectors with gamma-beams to study stellar process in the lab.
Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Adam Riess, Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer
The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics is proud to announce the 26th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer that will be on Friday, November 15th. For the details of the lecture see the Web Calendar post.
Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). Currently, he leads the SHOES Team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the Higher-z Team to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.
In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team’s discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe. The discovery was named by Science magazine in 1998 as “the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year.” His accomplishments have been recognized with a number of other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2007 (shared), and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006.