Physics and Astronomy News and Updates

"Spending two nights in a row obtaining near-infrared spectra of young stars may constitute the most unconventional Halloween weekend activity in the history of Colgate — and one of the most fulfilling", says one of the students.

An ordinary houseplant sitting in Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Ramesh Adhikari’s lab has become the star of his latest publication. It’s a golden pothos that he purchased at Home Depot.

It has been demonstrated in Prof. Adhikari's lab that the leaves of a common household plant, Golden Pothos, can be used to construct resistive memory devices. These devices can be turned "ON" or "OFF" by applying appropriate switching voltages and are stable for hundreds of cycles.

Prof. Linda Tseng was featured on the Styled by Science CEOs podcast, where she discussed a range of topics — from discovering a passion for research to clothing additives, chemicals, being a woman in STEM, and why representation matters.

Megan Martis ’20, who majored in astrogeophysics, has been highlighted in Colgate Magazine for her work with CLOVO, a company she founded in 2018.

The device that Associate Professor of Physics Jonathan Levine is helping to build doesn’t reside down the hall from his office, or in the same state. It’s about 1,700 miles away. But he and his colleagues hope that one day, their project won’t even share their planet. They hope the instrument will travel on a mission to the moon or Mars, where it could help answer questions about the history of the solar system.

Prof. Linda Tseng has been awarded the 2021 Oak Award for her research on extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and their interaction with bacteria and the ambient environment.

Prof. Illie and his team of undergraduate students at Colgate have been working on understanding the effect of dark matter in the growth of stars and the interaction of dark matter with regular matter. Some of their findings have recently been published in Journal for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in 2019 and Physical Review D in 2020.

Prof. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, Colgate class of 2003 and current Assistant Professor of Physics at Rochester Institute of Technology, will be leading a team of nearly 50 researchers to map the earliest structures of the universe. They will be using the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, to study the universe formed between 400,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Weigh in on Colgate's Effort to Diversify Its Faculty