The University of Maryland honored exceptional inventions that have the potential to influence science, society, and the free market. Nine Invention of the Year award nominees have been named across three categories: Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Information Sciences. The nominees were selected from all inventions disclosed by UMD researchers in 2018.

Pratyush Tiwary, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry with a joint appointment in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, is one of 30 early-career scientists named to the 2019 “Future of Biochemistry” list in the journal Biochemistry. Tiwary develops methods for simulating the behavior of molecular systems, such as proteins, on the atomic scale.

Christopher Jarzynski, Dave Thirumalai, former IPST postdoc Christina Marchetti and UMD alumnus Jordan Horowitz were among the American Physical Society’s spring 2019 prize and award winners. All four conduct research in statistical physics.

The Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the Department of Physics announce the 24th Annual Shih-I Pai Lecture. This year's lecture will be presented by Charles H. Bennett, IBM Fellow, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and 2018 Wolf Prize Recipient. His talk, "Occam's Razor, Boltzmann's Brain, and Wigner's Friend," will be given on Tuesday, October 9, 2019 at 4:00 pm in room 1412 of the Physics building at the University of Maryland, College Park. A reception preceding the lecture will take place at the James A. Yorke Rotunda in the Mathematics building from 3 to 3:50 pm.

The University of Maryland ranks 13th in applied math according to the 2018 U.S. News and World Report.

David Levermore was named a 2016 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award honors annually 4-6 tenured faculty members who combine outstanding scholarship with teaching excellence. Selected by a committee of former DSTs based on dossiers containing curriculum vitae, teaching dossier, statement about how the nominee integrates research and teaching, external letters of support from distinguished scholars outside the university, and letters of support from current or past students.

On August 14, 2017, a groundbreaking University of Maryland-designed cosmic ray detector will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the SpaceX-12 Commercial Resupply Service mission. The instrument, named ISS Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (ISS-CREAM), is roughly the size of a refrigerator and will remain installed on the ISS’ Japanese Experiment Module for at least three years. The massive amounts of data ISS-CREAM will collect could reveal new details about the origin and diversity of cosmic rays.

This year, instruments designed and built by Eun-Suk Seo's group (Physics/IPST) will journey to the International Space Station for a three-year mission to capture cosmic ray data beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

IPST and Physics Professor Daniel Lathrop was recently elected Vice-Chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics (GSNP). The Vice-Chair serves in that capacity for one year, becomes Chair-Elect in year two, and then serves as Chair of GSNP in year three.

The University of Maryland recently received a five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) grant to establish a new training and research program in network biology. Graduate students in the Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks (COMBINE) program will learn to marry physics-style quantitative modeling with data processing, analysis and visualization methods from computer science to gain deeper insights into the principles governing living systems. COMBINE’s principal investigator is associate professor Michelle Girvan (Physics/IPST).