SCIPP graduate student researcher Earl Almazan has been selected to receive a Graduate Instrumentation Research Award (GIRA) from the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD), part of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields (DPF). The national award recognizes Almazan’s innovative work developing thin-film sensors for charged particle tracking—technology that could significantly enhance […]
Stefania Gori, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) Fellowship from the American Physical Society (APS). The fellowship honors Gori for her seminal contributions to particle physics phenomenology beyond the Standard Model, particularly in advancing the understanding […]
Associate Professor Wolfgang Altmannshofer co-chairs the organizing committee for SUSY 2025. One of the most important annual gatherings in the field of theoretical and experimental particle physics will take place for the first time at the University of California, Santa Cruz from August 18th to 23rd. This year’s conference will be hosted by the Santa […]
SCIPP and UC Santa Cruz researchers played pivotal roles in the unveiling of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s first images, released June 23, 2025. Located atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón, this NSF–DOE facility includes the 8.4 m Simonyi Survey Telescope outfitted with a record-breaking 3.2‑gigapixel camera—the largest ever built. Steven Ritz led the Images Group that produced all the image products for First […]
Physicists from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics participated in the First Friday community science event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. The event on Friday, June 6 was sponsored as “Genome June.” The event was part of SCIPP’s ongoing commitment to community outreach, aiming to make complex physics accessible and engaging. […]
On Friday, May 2, the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) brought the wonders of the subatomic world to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s “Micro May” First Friday event. The evening, themed around the science of the small, featured SCIPP researchers engaging the public with insights into gravitational lensing and particle collisions. […]
Scientists from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at UC Santa Cruz are among the thousands of researchers honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) alongside its sister experiments ALICE, CMS and LHCb. This is one of the major awards sponsored […]
Approximately 30 high school students joined scientists from the Santa Cruz Institute from Particle Physics for the annual Particle Physics Masterclass at UCSC on March 15. The educational event introduced students to special relativity concepts, data analysis techniques, and experimental detector technology. Jason Nielsen, SCIPP Director and Professor of Physics, highlighted the international nature of […]
Researchers at UC Santa Cruz, including SCIPP faculty affiliates Alexie Leauthaud, Constance Rockosi and postdoc Sven Heydenreich, are part of the team announcing a suprising new measurement of dark energy. The new results with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggesting that dark energy, previously thought to be an elemental constant of nature, could be […]
Simone Mazza, an assistant research scientist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), has won an international award that recognizes contributions in the fields of fundamental interactions of matter. Mazza received the 2024 INFN Bruno Toushek Award from the Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation. Read the entire article here.
UC Santa Cruz strives to promote postdoctoral scholars that embody the mission and high standards of this university. This award recognizes postdoctoral scholars who show excellence in one or more of the following: exceptional research and/or creative activities, leadership, mentorship, and service. Postdoctoral scholars are individuals who have recently completed a doctoral degree and, under […]
Large Hadron Collider restarts after major upgrades UC Santa Cruz physicists have been at the forefront of U.S. participation in the LHC and contributed to a major upgrade of the ATLAS detector during the shutdown Click on title or here for full article
Each year, UC Santa Cruz’s five academic divisions—Arts, Baskin School of Engineering, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Physical and Biological Sciences—selects one graduate student alumnus/a/i as their Distinguished Graduate Student honoree. The awards ceremony for the 2022 cohort will take place on April 23 of Alumni Weekend. Risa Wechsler has been named UC Santa Cruz’s Physical […]
Digital NEST founder Jacob Martinez, chemistry teacher Michael Morgan, and astrophysicist Risa Wechsler are being honored by the UC Santa Cruz Division of Physical and Biological Sciences (PBSci) as the recipients of the PBSci Distinguished Alumni Awards. The division established the awards to honor graduates of the division who have gone on to extraordinary accomplishments […]
Throughout his career, UCSC physicist Michael Dine has explored challenging questions at the forefront of theoretical research in particle physics and cosmology. In a new book, This Way to the Universe (Penguin Random House, February 2022), Dine draws on decades of personal experience to offer an expert’s guide to the stunning achievements of modern physics as well […]
High school student visitors and SCIPP researchers participated in the 2022 Quarknet Particle Physics Masterclass on March 5. Students learned about the fundamental forces and particles, and they analyzed data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Students also visited a working cloud chamber detector and joined a videoconference with researchers from Fermilab and Berkeley Lab. […]
Two astrophysics research groups that SCIPP senior member Joel Primack leads received major awards of supercomputer time from the DOE-funded National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The computing these groups are doing at NERSC simulates galaxy formation in the context of the modern standard LambdaCDM theory of cosmology, dark […]
See below text or click here for article on webpage. — by Joel Primack | Jan 25, 2022 The following is a guest blog post from Joel R. Primack, Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Primack served as Sigma Xi’s president in 2018–2019. The James Webb Space Telescope is now successfully assembled, […]
See below text or click here for article on webpage. Dear Colleagues, Since my appointment as Director of Rubin Construction I’ve been working with the team to set up further appointments in the Director’s office (pending formal NSF approval). For the position of Deputy Director for Rubin Construction for AURA/NSF I am honored to announce […]
