Radiations Newsletter

Winter Term 2022 week 3

Please join us for a lunchtime chat with Dr. Gabriela González for this week’s Physics table.  We’ll do it Tuesday, January 18th at noon.  It will be a virtual lunch, so use this link.

Dr. Gaby Gonzalez from Louisiana State University will join us virtually THIS WEEK on Monday and Tuesday, January 17th and 18th for the annual Chesley Lecture.  She will meet with various student groups, research groups, and classes in addition to giving a public lecture on Tuesday, January 17th at 7:00 pm.  Watch the lecture from this link!

Hi, all–

Email Trenne if you’re interested in picking up some grading hours.  We need one more grader to help with Barry’s intro course, and one grader/observer to help with Cindy’s astro 110 class (you should have some astro experience for this).  Please do so ASAP so we can get you set up and connected with the instructor.  Thank you!

Larry Donahue
Monday, January 24 2022
8:30 am on Zoom

The modern baseball pitch: A physical perspective

Even though the sport of baseball is a century and a half old, the motion of a baseball in the flight from a
pitcher’s hand to home plate is not fully understood. With the introduction of Major League Baseball (MLB)’s
Hawk-Eye StatCast system for the 2020 season, the league tracks precise data relating to a pitch’s position.
Using publicly available data from Hawk-Eye StatCast, previously known force laws, and recent research on
the effect of seams on the flight of a baseball, I derive equations of motion for a pitched ball and use them to
create a model depicting the flight of a baseball. Before the pitch, I also examine the effect of various
substances on a pitched ball and derive an equation to account for adhesive substances popular in MLB prior to
recent rule enforcement.

Center for Engineering Mechanobiology (CEMB) Undergraduates Expanding Boundaries Summer 2022 Program

The Center for Engineering Mechanobiology seeks motivated undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds for its Undergraduate Summer Research Experience Program. This is a 10-week, on-campus program at the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis. Students are matched to projects within research groups based on their interests and educational background. Many projects are interdisciplinary and provide opportunities to develop research skills in the physical and biological sciences as well as engineering. Students develop practical skills in doing science: collaborating, designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results. Other aspects of the program complement the laboratory experience and are oriented toward professional development in broader scientific and career skills: seminars, journal clubs, professional skills and career workshops (research ethics, innovation, and technology transfer for instance). See attached flyer.

RESEARCH AREAS:

molecular biology, cell and tissue mechanics in plants and animals, bioengineering, biochemistry and biophysics, computational biology,  biomedical devices, nanoscale science and engineering

PROGRAM DETAILS:

Dates: May 31 – August 5, 2022 (10-weeks)

Locations:

• University of Pennsylvania (PENN) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (WUSTL)

The program offers:

• A competitive stipend
• Summer housing
• Travel assistance (if eligible)
• Social activities (museums, bbqs, baseball games)

 Application deadline: February 1, 2022

Learn more and apply online

Please feel free to contact Ms. Patricia Widder (WUSTL) at pwidder9876@wustl.edu or Dr. Annie Jeong (PENN) at annjeong@seas.upenn.edu with additional questions.

Graduate Physics program at UMass Lowell:  While our nominal deadline for Ph.D. applications is Jan 15, we will be giving full consideration to applications received by Feb 1 this year. Candidates who were unable to take the GRE due to the pandemic can request a waiver by emailing our Graduate coordinator with their application ID.

Here’s an electronic version of our 36-page brochure Merging Science with Technology available on our webpage, that describes research activities in the Department of Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Our campus is located twenty-five miles northwest of Boston, with a student population of over 18,000. We have 30 full-time faculty, approximately 75 graduate students and 100 undergraduate majors in the Department of Physics and Applied Physics. The Department has external grant and contract funding of over $10 million per year. Faculty research areas include advanced materials, astronomy and astrophysics, biomedical optics, biophysics, cosmology, medical physics, electromagnetic metamaterials, nanoscience and laser applications, nuclear physics (both fundamental and applied), photonics, plasma physics, quantum information, radiological health physics, soft condensed matter, space physics and terahertz technology. We are very excited about the strong cohort of researchers we have hired in the last few years who are adding new directions to our research strengths. More information is available on our website.

We are featured in the AIP website www.gradschoolshopper.com. Information on graduate schools applications and admissions are available.  Online application forms

Please feel free to contact me or Prof. Viktor Podolskiy, our Graduate Program Coordinator (Viktor_Podolskiy@uml.edu) if you or your students have any questions about our programs.

With best regards