University of Virginia Physics Department Welcome to the University of Virginia's Physics Department!
04/06/2026
The Hoxton Lecture is coming up this Thursday! Don't miss Dr. Xiangdong Ji's special Lecture title "Searching for Dark Matter"! This is a free, public event, so please invite your friends and family.
Where? Gilmer 301
When? 6pm
There will be a reception in the Physics atrium starting at 5:15.
11/18/2025
Faculty spotlight: UVA professor helps students understand how the world works Chris Neu studies dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider, bringing big ideas to his classroom and students into his lab.
10/22/2025
The Fourteenth Annual Sigma Pi Sigma Undergraduate Physics Research Symposium was held on October 17, 2025. We had a variety of both oral and poster presentations detailing multiple areas of physics.
Prizes were given to the best three oral presentations and best poster presentation. We would like to congratulate the following students for their outstanding performance:
Oral presentation:
1st Place: Grant Baker, Towards characterizing the biophysical landscape of immune cell plasma membranes with a novel modular toolbox
2nd Place: Bennett Lamb, Extraction of partial Bjorken sum from World Data and SoLID Simulations
3rd Place: Sydney Dixon, The Assembly and Testing of the Barrel Timing Layer for the CMS Experiment at the LHC
Poster presentation 1st Place: Nadara Hudson, Mutli-Technique Characterization of Returned Bennu Particles in Comparison to Carbonaceous Chondrites
We would also like to give special thanks to all of our judges and participants as well as both the physics and astronomy departments as a whole for dedicating their time to make this symposium possible.
For past symposia and the future, please see https://spsatuva.github.io/2025/10/17/sigma-pi-sigma-symposium-25/
09/24/2025
Congratulations to our newly endowed professor, Xiaochao Zheng, for receiving the Brown-Forman Professorship!
Read more about UVA's endowed professors here:
A&S Celebrates Newly Endowed Professorships The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences recognized 16 newly appointed endowed professors at a celebratory Investiture Ceremony last week.
08/27/2025
Ever wonder what they're actually doing over in the High Energy Physics building?
This video features Chris Neu's research group building a new precision timing detector for use at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Discoveries: It's About Time (Video) Physics professor Chris Neu and his team of students and staff are building and testing a new precision timing detector for use at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) that measures subatomic particles with a precision of 30 trillionths of a second. Watc...
08/15/2025
Congratulations to Diego Ibarra Hoyos for receiving the 2025 SandboxAQ Scholarship for his project "Quantum Machine Learning for Material Design"!
"These ten awardees are being recognized for their high impact academic research and bold vision for the future of AQ. Each will receive a USD $10,000 scholarship." https://www.sandboxaq.com/company/scholarships