John competed in UCF’s first-ever 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition last semester. You can watch his presentation, along with those of other students, here.

19 Florida Prison Education Project (FPEP) students at the Central Florida Reception Center started a Physics and Everyday Thinking course on Wednesday. The course, organized by Mike Chini, is being team-taught with UCF Physics faculty Ahlam Al-Rawi, Mihai Vaida, and Bill Kaden, as well as Physics graduate students Dave Austin, Stephanie Jarmak, and Justin Reyes and Optics graduate student Nick Cox. Read more about FPEP’s mission, and donate to the program, at https://cah.ucf.edu/fpep/.

Prof. Vaida demonstrates the “mystery tube” to introduce scientific models

Omar Suarez, a student who came to us from Valencia College through the Central Florida PREP (Physics Research Exchange Program), completed his summer project on developing a second compression stage for our few-cycle laser source and presented at the PREP symposium. He was mentored on the project by John and Murty. Congratulations, Omar, and we look forward to hearing about your future success!

Jonathan Nesper, a new PhD student in the LUMAS group, was awarded a Summer Mentoring Fellowship to begin work in the lab this past summer. He recently presented his work at their annual symposium, along with the other award recipients. Great job, Jonathan!

Our paper on a HHG-based setup for time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy is posted on the arXiv! This paper is the first result of a >2 year collaboration with Madhab Neupane’s group at UCF to study ultrafast processes in quantum and topological materials. We have big plans for this setup, including the integration of few-cycle laser-driven harmonics and intense long-wavelength pump pulses!

Shima was selected as runner-up for the Physics Student of the Year competition! Congratulations, Shima!

John’s poster, “Two-Stage Nonlinear Compression of a Yb:KGW Laser Amplifier to Sub-10 fs Duration” was selected as an Exemplary Poster at the UCF Graduate Research Forum! John will have the opportunity to present his work at the Statewide Graduate Student Research Symposium, to be held next week at Florida International University. Congratulations, John!

John and Shima presented their work at the 2019 Graduate Research Forum, while Erin and Marc (not shown) presented posters at the Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence. All of them did a fantastic job representing the group!

Nrisimha Murty Madugula has joined our research group as a postdoc. Murty received his PhD degree in 2016 from IIT Madras and was a postdoctoral fellow at TIFR Mumbai from 2016-2019. He will lead the development of a new attosecond beamline to study coherence dynamics resulting from strong-field excitation of atoms and molecules. Welcome, Murty!

New graduate students Troie Journigan and Chau Truong have joined our research group. Troie received her bachelors degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 2016, and is currnetly in her first year of an APS Bridge Fellowship. Chau received bachelors (2011) and masters (2013) degrees in physics from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology in Vietnam, where she worked as a lecturer until 2017. Welcome, Troie and Chau!