Olivia DrakeThe American Physical Society awarded Chia Wei "Wade" Hsu ’10 with its prestigious LeRoy Apker Award for his achievements while at Wesleyan. The American Physical Society awards the Apker Award to only one student from a Ph.D-granting institution each year. Reinhold Blümel, the Charlotte Agusta Ayres Professor of Physics, calls it a "mini-Nobel Prize." The award provides encouragement to young physicists who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment. “This means that Wade out-competed students from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and CalTech,” says Wade's former advisor Francis Starr, associate professor of physics. “He’s the best of the best.” On…
A $298,736 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will allow Wesleyan to remain competitive in numerical modeling research and education on an international level. Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, and Michael Weir, professor of biology, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, received the grant for a project titled “Major Research Instrumentation – Recovery and Reinvestment program (MRI-R2): Acquisition of Shared Cluster and Database Computing Facilities at Wesleyan University.” The grant, awarded over three years beginning May 1, will fund growth of the computer…
Francis Starr, associate professor of physics; David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics; and Michael Weir, professor of biology, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, received a grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “MRI-R2: Acquisition of Shared Cluster and Database Computing Facilities at Wesleyan University.” The grant, worth $298,736, will be awarded over three years beginning May 1, 2010. The grant was awarded as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Chia Wei "Wade" Hsu '10 and Francis Starr, are co-authors of "Hierarchies of networked phases induced by multiple liquid-liquid critical points," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105, 13711-13715. Hsu and Starr showed that by attaching specific single strands of DNA to nano-sized particles to create customizable "nano-atoms," they could generate new materials with phase diagrams never previously seen in nature. Their work is based on a massive set of computations on the new university computer cluster. Fred Ellis, professor of physics, is Hsu’s faculty advisor.