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November 16, 2012

Rob Cockcroft is the focus of a Dailynews article by Andrew Baulcomb where Rob is described as ‘the University’s ‘galactic archaeologist’.  A very active member of the department, Rob has been the manager of the W.J. McCallion Planetarium and Theatre Coordinator at McMaster’s 3D Origins Institute while researching for his PhD. Rob will receive his PhD at this afternoon’s Fall Convocation proceedings.

October 30, 2012

McMaster undergrads came away with 7 awards from the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference (CUPC) at the University of British Columbia last weekend.

Richard Parg – 1st place for talk in Condensed Matter Physics
Michael Birch – 1st place for talk in Particle and Nuclear Physics
Darren Fernandes – 1st place for talk in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Alison Kinross – 3rd place for talk in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics
Miles Couchman – 3rd place for talk in Condensed Matter Physics
Piotr Roztocki – 3rd place for talk in Biological and Medical physics
Randy Belanger – 3rd place poster

Congratulations to all participants for a great showing.

In addition, the bid put together by the McMaster team for the conference next year was successful so that CUPC will be held at McMaster in 2013.

July 10, 2012

McMaster Physics and Astronomy Professor Cliff Burgess is much in the news of late fielding questions about the recent Higgs boson announcements. For more on what the discovery means please see his op-ed piece in the Toronto Sunday Star Higgs boson explains a lot about nothing and the Daily News article Concerning CERN: Cliff Burgess on the discovery of the Higgs boson.

June 11, 2012

McMaster Physics and Astronomy alumnus, Gary R. Davis, will receive an honorary doctorate at the Spring 2012 Convocation. After completing degrees at Toronto and Oxford he joined tbe University of Saskatchewan as a professor of physics and engineering physics before becoming the director of the Joint Astronomy Centre at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. Davis led the team that developed the Fabry-Perot subsystem for the Long Wavelength Spectrometer(LWS) instrument and played key roles in developing the SCUBA-2 camera and in organizing Canada’s participation in the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory. A member of the American and Canadian astronomical societies and the Royal Astronomical Society, Davis has received a Certificate of Recognition from the European Space Agency and a Group Achievement Award from the Royal Astronomical Society.

June 11, 2012

Congratulations are in order to two of our graduate students, Annie Hou and Yasuhiro Hasegawa, who excelled at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) held at the University of Calgary during the first week of June.

Anne Hou – Best Student Talk
“The impact of group dynamics and substructure on galaxy evolution”
Supervised by Laura Parker and Bill Harris

Yasuhiro Hasegawa – Best Student Paper
“The origin of planetary system architectures – I. Multiple planet traps in gaseous discs”
Supervised by Ralph Pudritz

May 2, 2012

Physics and Astronomy Professor Emeritus John Berlinsky is this year’s recipient of the MUFA (McMaster University Faculty Association) award for outstanding service and was honoured with a reception in the Great Hall of the University Club. The award is presented annually to faculty and professional librarians who have made an outstanding contribution to the University through the provision of exceptional service to faculty, librarians, staff, students or alumni.

April 24, 2012

Physics and Astronomy Professor Christine Wilson made the front page of the Hamilton Spectator in an interview that related her studies of ‘our local neighbourhood’ using the new Scuba-2 camera at the 15-metre James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Hamilton Spectator

April 3, 2012

Rob D’Ortenzio has been awarded the Carl Westcott Memorial Fellowship. This is given annually to an outstanding graduate student who does most of their thesis research at TRIUMF. Congratulations Rob!

February 16, 2012

An international team of scientists, including two astronomers from McMaster University, has been able to re-observe an event first seen on Earth more than 150 years ago. Physics and Astronomy Professor Doug Welch and PhD student Brendan Sinnott assisted the investigation of a distant stellar eruption that was first observed 150 years ago by looking at the light from the event reflected off of space dust.

Daily News,also see the CBC, and the CBC’s Quirks and Quarks

January 19, 2012

Master’s student in astronomy, Brittany MacDonald, received some international attention when a photograph she took while working with the Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in southern Arizona, was included by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh in an announcement that was picked up by news services around the world.

Daily News