Thanks to the hard work of graduate students Lorena Magaña Zertuche and Sumeet Kulkarni and Assistant Professor Jake Bennett, we now have a digital version of the Oxford Science Café. New Ssippin’ Science podcasts will be released in the coming weeks, including one of Earth Day.

Graduate student Sumeet Kulkarni has published a piece entitled “Mind the Mass Gap” in Scientific American’s Observations blog.

The 2017 GWIC-Braccini Thesis Prize recognizes outstanding doctoral research in gravitational waves. Dr Hector Okada da Silva, who completed his Ph.D. at The University of Mississippi under the supervision of Dr. Emanuele Berti, was chosen for the award from a large, international group of nominees whose theses covered diverse aspects of the field of gravitational waves. For more details please follow this link.

Hunter Gabbard, a recent graduate of The University of Mississippi’s Bachelor of Science physics program, is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Glasgow. Under the supervision of Dr Christopher Messenger, Mr Gabbard and his collaborators have demonstrated that machine learning algorithms may be useful in automating the search for astrophysical events that are detected on earth as gravitational waves.

Many physics graduate students presented their research at the 82nd Annual Meeting of Mississippi Academy of Sciences, which was held February 22–23 in Hattiesburg, MS. Students Shrobana Ghosh and Sunethra Dayavansha were each awarded first prize for talks they gave in the Physics and Engineering division; BB Pilgrim earned second prize. Ashoka Karunarathne’s poster was awarded third prize in the Mississippi INBRE graduate scholars symposium.