Adam Keith, an undergraduate Physics major at North Carolina State University visited Georgetown University for an REU in the summer of 2011 and has returned in the summer of 2012. Results from his work in the first summer have been published in the prestigious journal Nature (see the news story below) and in Physical Review Letters May 25 issue. Adam was mentored by postdoctoral fellow Joseph Wang and Professor Freericks. Currently he is working on finishing two more publications from this work.

A Georgetown team led by Prof. James Freericks, postdoctoral fellow Joseph Wang, and undergraduate REU student Adam Keith (NC State) provided theory and computational work to help understand a quantum simulator built at NIST in Boulder, CO, that approaches having the memory of one Googol bits (10¹⁰⁰ bits). The work was published in the April 26, 2012 issue of Nature, one of the most prestigious general science journals.

Marguerite Brown, a second-year physics Ph.D. student, has been named a 2012-13 ARCS Fellow. The fellowship will support her research in the Blair lab on liquid-crystal formation. The mission of the ARCS Foundation is to advance science and technology in the US by awarding fellowships and scholarships to outstanding students in science and engineering.

Dr. Michael Helle, who received his Physics Ph.D. from Georgetown in 2011, has been announced as the winner of the 2012 Harold N. Glassman Dissertation Award in the Sciences. This award is given by the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to honor distinguished dissertations. Mike completed his Ph.D. work under the direction of Professor Ed Van Keuren and Dr. Antonio Ting at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC, where most of his research was carried out.