Campus Updates

Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

With civil construction of the project substantially complete, the focus at FRIB is now the installation of technical equipment. A key piece of equipment required for the heavy-ion beam was recently delivered to campus from California. FRIB partnered with the Berkeley Center for Magnet Technology (BCMT) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) to design and build the state-of-the-art magnet.

Read more about this collaboration on the FRIB website.

Additional building projects planned at FRIB will include space for a new large-scale detector, as well as areas for isotope harvesting and an assembly area for equipment operating at hundreds of degrees below zero. Input from the campus community will be solicited during the planning process.

MSU Contributes to Neutron Star Discovery

Last October, astronomers announced the collision of two neutron stars–the first ever observed–and Michigan State University contributed to this substantial discovery.

After the initial detection, numerous observatories joined the search, including the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope, (SOAR), located in Cerro Pachon, Chile. It is operated by the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory for the SOAR consortium, of which MSU is a founding member. SOAR was one of 70 observatories that contributed to this research, and the documentation developed by the team was critical for understanding the evolution of the source.

Jay Strader, assistant professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, was co-author of one of the papers confirming the discovery, and Arash Bahramian, research associate, contributed to the research.

According to Strader, “SOAR is positioned prominently to perform follow-up work well into the next decade.” SOAR will provide research opportunities for our faculty and students, as well as researchers around the world. Read more about this discovery.

Besley Elected to AAAS

John Besley, the Ellis N. Brandt Chair in Public Relations and associate professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. Besley was elected as an AAAS Fellow for his distinguished contributions to the field of science communication and the study of public opinion about science and technology. He has also been instrumental in developing the new research communication workshops being conducted for faculty here on campus.

Lin Receives NSF Early Career and DOE Awards

Huey-Wen Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was recently awarded a five-year National Science Foundation Early CAREER award and a 2017 Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Lin was selected for the Early CAREER Award under the NSF’s Division of Physics for her research, “Constraining Parton Distribution Functions for New-Physics Searches,” which aims to understand nucleon structure through the development and implementation of first-principles calculations using supercomputers. Lin is also the principal investigator of a project that received a 2017 ALCC award from the DOE at ASCR’s supercomputing facilities.

McCusker Named MSU Foundation Professor

Professor James McCusker, Department of Chemistry, and director of MSU’s Center of Research Excellence in Complex Materials is the latest researcher to be named an MSU Foundation Professor. McCusker’s research focuses on ultrafast excited-state dynamics of transition metal compounds, particularly how they relate to the development of solar energy conversion strategies based on earth-abundant materials. His research group also studies the photophysics and photochemistry of exchange-coupled compounds, with an eye toward understanding electronic structure effects on electron and energy transfer processes in molecular systems. McCusker was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry last fall, illustrating the global reach of research being conducted by our faculty and their graduate students.