The department of Physics and Astronomy would like to welcome our newest postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Janaka Kospalage.

Dr. Kospalage completed his PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. His research interests include experimental searches for heavy flavor physics and CP violation. As a member of the Belle II experiment, based in Tsukuba, Japan, he has contributed to software and computing efforts as well as detector commissioning.

Last semester, we were also joined by four postdocs, Drs. Crnkovic, Csukás, Johnson-McDaniel, and Mukherjee. You can read their brief bios here. Welcome to all!

Students and Faculty from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Mississippi had a very strong showing at the 2021 South East Section of the American Physical Society (SESAPS2021) meeting.

From left to right: Dr. Davies , Sakul Mahat, Paul Gebeline, Wil Stacy, Matthew Mestayer, Dr. BennettDr. Gavin Davies presented results from NOνA

Sumeet Kulkarni ties for first place in the doctoral student category of 3MT (3 minute thesis).

The department of Physics and Astronomy would like to welcome four new postdoctoral research associates. They are:

• Jason Crnkovic — High Energy Experiment
• Károly Zoltán Csukás — General Relativity
• Nathan Johnson-McDaniel — General Relativity
• Lopamudra Mukherjee — High Energy Theory

Dr. Károly Csukás received his PhD from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (Hungary). While completing his PhD programme he was working as a Research Assistant at the Theoretical Physics Department of Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Budapest. Dr Csukás has broad interest in mathematical and numerical relativity, especially in studying the evolution of linear perturbations of rotating black holes and investigating novel methods to produce perturbed black hole initial data.

Dr. Nathan Johnson-McDaniel received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University (as a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos) and was most recently a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. His interests are in gravitational waves in particular, and relativistic astrophysics in general; specifically numerical and analytic gravitational wave source modeling and gravitational wave data analysis, particularly tests of general relativity. He mostly works on compact binaries (consisting of black holes or neutron stars), but has also worked on predictions for gravitational waves from deformed isolated neutron stars.

Dr. Lopamudra Mukherjee completed her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. Her research interests lie in the phenomenology of Beyond the Standard Model of particle physics particularly in several aspects of flavor physics and dark matter. She has worked on model building aspects for explaining the anomalous results in semileptonic b-decays via a dark sector and in general with beyond the Standard Model physics.

Physics graduate student John Waite has been awarded a Dissertation Fellowship for the Spring 2022 semester. This non-service fellowship is that will also include a tuition waiver.