Chair’s Letter / Spring 2025

Dear Physics Department Alumni & Friends,

It has been a busy spring semester in the Physics Department. We are expanding our classroom space as our undergraduate program is seeing record enrollments. We have led four faculty searches, which have so far recruited one new lecturer as well as new faculty in particle theory and experimental biophysics. Our faculty and students have won prestigious awards. Our experimental high energy physics group is sharing in the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its contributions to CMS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

This newsletter contains those details as well as a research update from a new faculty member, Siyao Xu in astrophysics theory. It also has profiles of graduate student Parisa Alimohamadi in condensed matter theory and postdoc Mia West in particle theory. As usual, this spring newsletter reports the graduate student research awards that were given in December; the fall newsletter will report the undergraduate awards that are given in late spring.

We are grateful to all the alumni and friends who have supported the department on UF Giving Day and throughout the year. I wish everyone a relaxing (but productive!) summer.

Best regards,

Steve Hagen

Physics Department Chair