Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

We are pleased to announce that the Mississippi LIGO Team has been awarded the grant Mississippi Participation in LIGO’s Search for Gravitational Waves: Getting Ready for Advanced LIGO from the National Science Foundation. Expected duration of the award is three years, starting July 1st, 2011.

Astronomy’s New Messengers: Listening to the Universe with Gravitational Waves, the public outreach project directed by Marco is live again! The LIGO exhibit, designed by the New York-based firm L.H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership and renown artist Leni Schwendinger will be on view at Shawnee State University in Ohio from Friday, April 15 through Friday, Aug. 29. The small portable version of Astronomy’s New Messengers is on display at the University of Texas at Arlington, near Dallas. More information at the exhibit website.

Jocelyn Read has been invited to give a presentation at the APS April Meeting in Anaheim, California, in a session entitled “Neutron Stars: what’s the matter?”. She has also been funded to participate in the APS Professional Skills Development Workshop at the meeting.

Jocelyn has also been invited to speak this year at the Exploring Physics with Neutron Stars conference in Tucson, Arizona, and the Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the new webpage of the Gravitation, Astrophysics, and Theoretical Physics group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). We will use this blog to post news about the group, including visitors, talks, research, outreach activities etcetera.

Browse People to see who we are; Research to see what we do; Papers for our recent publications; Media to see what people say of our research; Funding to see who supports our work; and Movies for some eye candy.

We’ll keep you posted!

Vitor Cardoso was awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant. This is a 5 year-long grant, consisting typically on a 1 to 2 Million Euro financing awarded by the European Research Council, for outstanding junior researchers in any research field in Europe.

Citation: ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grants aim to support up-and-coming research leaders who are about to establish or consolidate a proper research team and to start conducting independent research in Europe. The scheme targets promising researchers who have the proven potential of becoming independent research leaders. It will support the creation of excellent new research teams and will strengthen others that have been recently created.