The gravity group is hosting several visitors this Spring. Most of them are coming with funding from the Strong Gravity and High Energy Physics Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) Action, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015. All of these visitors will take part in the StronG BaD (Strong Gravity and Binary Dynamics) workshop (see the announcement in Ole Miss News).

Here is the list of visitors and their arrival/departure dates:

Leonardo Gualtieri (Rome), Feb 16-Mar 1

Laura Bernard (IST Lisbon), Feb 20-Mar 20
Seth Hopper (IST Lisbon), Feb 20-Mar 20
Andrea Nerozzi (IST Lisbon), Feb 20-Mar 20

Michalis Agathos (Cambridge), Feb 21-Mar 21
William Cook (Cambridge), Feb 21-Mar 21
Christopher Moore (Cambridge), Feb 21-Mar 21
Roxana Rosca (Cambridge), Feb 21-Mar 21

Atsushi Nishizawa (Nagoya), Feb 23-Mar 3

Pedro Cunha (Aveiro), Feb 25-Mar 24
Carlos Herdeiro (Aveiro), Feb 25-Mar 11

Antoine Klein (Paris), Feb 26-Mar 15

On February 1, Dr. Emanuele Berti joined the Editorial Board of Physical Review Letters as a Divisional Associated Editor for Gravitational Physics (read the story in Ole Miss News).

Dr. Berti is also one of the IOP Outstanding Reviewer Award winners for 2016. The Award is given “in recognition of the high quality and timeliness of [his] reviews for Classical and Quantum Gravity.”

Two Brazilian researchers received prestigious awards to visit the Physics Department in the Spring and Fall of 2017.

Professor Maurício Richartz (Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição, Universidade Federal do ABC, São Paulo, Brazil) was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to visit our department. Professor Richartz will visit for about four months, two in the Spring 2017 (starting on January 24) and two in the Fall 2017. On February 7 he will give a Physics colloquium with title “Analogue Black Holes: Theory and Experiments”.

Caio Macedo, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Federal University of Pará (Belém, Brazil) in professor Luís Crispino’s Grav@Zon group, also received a grant from the APS International Research Travel Award Program to visit our department.

According to the U.S. News & World Report’s 2017 Best Global Universities List, the School of Pharmacy and the Department of Physics and Astronomy are the highest ranked units at the University of Mississippi. The best single-indicator rankings for our department are “Physics percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited”, “Physics international collaboration” and “Physics normalized citation impact”.

Ulrich Sperhake, Adjunct Professor at the University of Mississippi and long-term collaborator of the gravity group, was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society from the Division of Gravitational Physics. The list of new Fellows for 2016 is available at the APS website.