News
The UTRGV Ph.D. in Physics has been approved by the UT Board of Regents and is pending approval by the THECB
UTRGV Optics Lab Participates in STEM Conference at Lamar
This year Lamar University (Beaumont, Texas, and is a member of the Texas State University System) held its 7th Annual STEM Conference on November 2, 2019. The Organizing Committee of the conference invited Dr. Malik Rakhmanov, Associate Professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy, and his research group to participate in the meeting. The 7th STEM Conference featured nearly 50 presentations in which students from Texas and the neighboring state of Louisiana presented highlights of their research. Dr. Rakhmanov and his group prepared several presentations for this conference. Anton Gribovskiy, a PhD candidate in the UTRGV-UT Arlington cooperative Physics PhD program, presented a poster titled "Spectroscopy with Nonlinear Si Integrated Microring Resonators,” Artemiy Bogdanovskiy, also a PhD student in the same program, presented a poster “Experimental Setup to Model Gravitational Wave Detection”. Satzhan Sitmukhambetov gave a talk “Basics of Quantum Computing.” Also from UTRGV attending the meeting was Amit Aich (2nd year MSIS: Science & Technology student). The UTRGV Group actively participated in all sessions of the conference, engaged in the discussions and interacted with the local students and faculty. Lamar commemorated all UTRGV presenters with diplomas and generously supported their visit. In addition, Anton Gribovskiy won the third place among all poster presenters taking home a financial award.

UTRGV gets $375k for gravitational waves research
The NSF grant will support the university’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave-Observatory (LIGO) instrumentation and data analysis, and provide funding for new gravitational wave detection techniques and experimental innovations to enhance the probability of discovering new gravitational waves sources.
More details at The Monitor
NSF funds UTRGV professor’s TOROS telescope project to track cosmic gravitational wave events
The National Science Foundation has awarded UTRGV’s Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy (CGWA) $516,000 for the second phase of construction of a telescope dedicated to research on gravitational waves.
More details at: UTRGV Newsroom
Dr. Hyun-chul Lee gets the Regents Outstanding Teaching Award
Dr. Hyun-chul Lee, Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy has received the 2019 Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. The department congratulates Dr. Lee!

Dr. Volker Quetschke given UTRGV Exceptional Service Award

Faculty members at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley were recognized, celebrated, and honored for their exceptional accomplishments during the annual Faculty Excellence Awards Thursday, May 2.
More details at: https://www.utrgv.edu/newsroom/2019/05/02-exceptional-accomplishments-by-faculty-recognized-at-annual-utrgv-awards-program.htm
PhysTEC Fellows

Dr. Liang Zeng and Dr. Nicolas Pereyra, Associate Professors in the department, have been selected to be 2019-20 PhysTEC Fellows! The UTRGV team comprising Dr. Zeng and Dr. Pereyra was among five selected from different institutions around the country!
Outstanding International Female Student
Fatemeh Mostafavikhatam, a physics graduate student under the supervision of Dr. Hamidreza Ramezani, received the award for Outstanding International Female Student. Dr. Volker Quetschke, associate professor of physics and astronomy, presented her with a plaque and flowers.
“This award is very motivating for me because after a lot of hard work I put into my research here in the United States … and I found that at the end, my results are recognized by the university and they have this type of meeting to encourage students that their effort is seen and rewarded by the university. So, it’s important to me,” Mostafavikhatam said.
Read more at: https://www.utrgv.edu/newsroom/2019/03/29-utrgv-hosts-international-womens-day-celebration-on-brownsville-campus.htm
Department faculty members recognized

Physics and Astronomy department faculty members have been recognized at the UTRGV College of Sciences Research Symposium held Friday, March 29, 2019. Dr. Hyun-chul Lee (left) has been awarded the 2018-19 Teaching Excellence Prize, while Dr. Volker Quetschke (right) has received the 2018-19 Service Excellence award. The department congratulates Dr. Lee and Dr. Quetschke for their wonderful accomplishments.
Prof. Mohanty has published a new book "Swarm intelligence methods for statistical regression"
Prof. Mohanty has published a new book "Swarm intelligence methods for statistical regression" (Chapman and Hall/CRC press). The book expands on lectures delivered by Prof. Mohanty at the "BigDat2017" winter school on big data, Bari, Italy, and explains how to tackle the optimization challenges often encountered in
statistical analysis of big data using a relatively new breed of nature-inspired methods. One particular swarm intelligence method, called particle swarm optimization (PSO), was first used in gravitational wave data analysis by Prof. Mohanty and collaborators and has helped solve some outstanding challenges in this area. The book discusses the application of PSO to both parametric and non-parametric regression problems in general, not confined to gravitational waves alone. Further information is available at the publisher's website.
LIGO and Virgo Announce Four New Gravitational-Wave Detections
On Saturday, December 1, scientists attending the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop in College Park, Maryland, presented new results from the National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and the
European-based VIRGO gravitational-wave detector regarding their searches for coalescing cosmic objects, such as pairs of black holes and pairs of neutron stars. The LIGO and Virgo collaborations have now confidently detected gravitational waves from a total of 10
stellarmass binary black hole mergers and one merger of neutron stars, which are the dense, spherical remains of stellar explosions. Six of the black hole merger events had been reported before, while four are newly announced. See
CGWA press release.
4th NANOSMAT-USA 2018 conference at South Padre Island, TX, USA

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The 4th NANOSMAT-USA 2018 conference will be held at Isla Grand Beach Resort South Padre Island, TX, USA during October 29th to November 1st 2018. NANOSMAT is widely recognized as a premier conference focused on traditional topics in “NANO” such as Nanoscience, Nano-Engineering and Nanotechnology as well as emerging new research directions such as Nanobiology, Nanomedicine and economical aspects of NANO. The conference will be sponsored by UTRGV. For more information, see http://www.nanosmat-usa.com/default.asp. The abstract submission deadline is 15 August, 2018. For registration details, see http://www.nanosmat-usa.com/registration.asp.
Prof. Myoung-Hwan Kim receives 2018 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from AKPA

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Prof. Myoung-Hwan Kim received the 2018 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Association of Korean Physicists in America (AKPA) for his contribution to modern material research including low-dimensional, topological, and correlated systems with terahertz and infrared lasers. Prof. Kim has more than 10 years of experience in far/mid/near infrared Hall measurements for various types of materials including topological insulators, graphene mono- and multilayers, itinerant ferromagnets, superconductors, semiconductors, and insulators. The infrared Hall angle measurement is one of the most powerful way to disclose Fermi surface information, which are comparable with the results acquired from angular-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and de Haas-van Alphen oscillations. In addition, Prof. Kim has recently developed a new tool to measure polarimetric spectrum at underexplored mid/far infrared. Using this tool, Prof. Kim will observe a frequency evolution of quasi-particle scattering in a time-reversal symmetry broken system. This research will benefit the understanding of more complex spin-orbit coupled system. The award ceremony took place at the Korean Physical Society-AKPA Symposium at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the American Physical Society March meeting. Prof. Kim gave an award presentation on his research.
(For more details visit akpa.org)
Prof. HyeongJun Kim receives UT System Rising STARs award.

Prof. HyeongJun Kim received the prestigious UT System Rising STARs award. The award will go towards establishing research on single-molecule biophysics of genome organization at UTRGV. Dr. Kim will join our department from Harvard Medical School in spring 2018. Dr. Kim has been trained as a single-molecule biophysicist. Traditionally, biologists observed multiple (tens or even thousands of) molecules simultaneously and obtained "averaged" (ensemble) information. However, the advent of single-molecule biophysics techniques enabled scientists to observe "individual" biological molecules such as DNA or proteins one-by-one, getting very detailed information that cannot be obtained by traditional methods. Dr. Kim's research as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School focused on both single-molecule technology development and its application to answering biological questions. At UTRGV, Dr. Kim plans to carry out research on underlying working mechanisms of various DNA-associated proteins by utilizing his single-molecule biophysics expertise.
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