IPST Professor Wendell T. Hill, III has been appointed director of the Chemical Physics program in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST), effective July 1, 2020.

Ellen D. Williams, a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, has been named director of the university’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) for a five-year term beginning July 1, 2020.

University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor Christopher Jarzynski was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Jarzynski has appointments in Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology. 

Jarzynski is one of 120 members and 26 international members elected in 2020, joining a select group of 2,403 scientists around the country—16 of whom hail from UMD's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences—recognized for their influential research and elected by their peers.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship to Christopher Jarzynski, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physics, and Institute for Physical Science and Technology. Each year, 175 Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to a diverse group of writers, scholars, artists and scientists.

Physics Professor Johnpierre Paglione has been awarded more than $1.5 million by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to study the complex behavior of electrons in quantum materials. The new grant was awarded by the Moore Foundation’s Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) initiative, a quantum materials research program that funds work on materials synthesis, experiments, and theory, with an interdisciplinary approach that includes physicists, chemists, and materials scientists. 

IPST and Physics Professor Dan Lathrop's liquid sodium experiment is set to be overhauled after 11 years of operation. The experiment is set as a way to simulate and perhaps even predict changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which originates in its core and helps protect the surface from harmful solar radiation.

Distinguished University Professor Christopher Jarzynski (IPST/CHEM/PHYS) was among three faculty members in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) who received 2020 Simons Foundation Fellowships. The prestigious fellowships provide support for faculty scientists to extend a one-term, university-sponsored sabbatical into a full year, allowing them to focus solely on advancing fundamental research in mathematics or theoretical physics.

Chemical Physics Ph.D. Student Renjie Zhao was first-author on the paper "Response Theory for Static and Dynamic Solvation of Ionic and Dipolar Solutes in Water" with John Weeks, Distinguished University Professor of IPST. The paper was published in the Journal of Statistical Physics on February 17, 2020.

Tsung-Jen Liao, biochemistry Ph.D. student and NCI-UMD Partnership student, published a first-author paper titled "High-Affinity Interactions of the nSH3/cSH3 Domains of Grb2 with the C-Terminal Proline-Rich Domain of SOS1" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on January 23, 2020. Paper co-authors included NIH's Ruth Nussinov and UMD Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry David Fushman. 

With the arrival of Assistant Professor Leah Dodson in September 2019, UMD’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry expanded in new directions. Dodson is a laboratory astrochemist, which means she studies the chemistry of interstellar space and the atmospheres around other planets.