About
The Department of Physics and Astronomy hosts a colloquium every Wednesday afternoon in 227 Gallalee Hall during the fall and spring semesters (excluding holidays and exam week). Speakers include UA faculty and graduate students as well as researchers from other universities, research institutes, and government agencies. The subject matter ranges from information about the University and department to topics of recent interest in physics and astronomy. Talks are typically 45 – 50 minutes in length followed by ~10 minutes of questions.
Attendance is free and open to the public. Physics and astronomy graduate students are required to attend colloquia regularly, as determined by their advisors; more information about this requirement may be found in the department’s Graduate Handbook.
Visitor information, including directions and parking details, can be found on our Directions and Parking page.
Schedule
Find this year’s colloquia here. Upcoming colloquia are listed in the left sidebar of this page and under the colloquium category in the department events calendar.
Fall 2014
Unless otherwise noted, colloquia are held Wednesdays 3:45–4:45pm in Gallalee Hall 227. Coffee and cookies are available starting at 3:30.
| Date | Title/Abstract | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 9/10 | Graduate Student Survival at UA: from First Semester to Dissertation Defense | Gary Mankey, University of Alabama |
| 9/17 | Faculty Interests Mini-Colloquia: The CMS experiment and the activities of the UA CMS group | Paulo Araujo & Paolo Rumerio, University of Alabama |
| 9/24 | Faculty Interests Mini-Colloquia: How supernova explosions are influenced by what the star is made of, and why it is important for measuring the makeup of the universeStudying Galaxy Evolution with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey |
Dean Townsley & Preethi Nair, University of Alabama |
| 10/1 | UA physics teacher education: why you are probably using assessments incorrectly | Penni Wallace & Patrick LeClair, University of Alabama |
| 10/8 | Galaxy Morphology from the Near to the Far Universe | Ron Buta, University of Alabama |
| 10/15 | The E-Nova Project: A Multi-Wavelength Initiative to Probe the Ejecta and Environments of Novae |
Laura Chomiuk, Michigan State University |
| 10/29 | The Science and Technologies of Spin Angular Momentum Transfer | Jonathan Sun, IBM Research |
| 11/5 | Graphene for Enhancement of Raman Effect | Mildred Dresselhaus Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) |
| 11/12 | Star Formation and Stellar Populations of Ultra-Luminous Galaxies at High Redshifts | Haojing Yan, University of Missouri |
| 11/19 | The Beauty of the Many-Body Strong Interaction | Thomas Hemmick, Stony Brook |
| 12/3 | Supermassive black hole binaries: the search continues | Tamara Bogdanovic Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Georgia Tech |
Spring 2015
Unless otherwise noted, spring Colloquium will be held on Wednesdays from 4:00–5:00 p.m. in 227 Gallalee Hall. Refreshments, including tea, coffee, and cookies, will be served at 3:45 p.m. in 223 Gallalee Hall.
| Date | Title/Abstract | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 1/14 | Dark Matter Detection Results, LUX, LZ and the State of the Field | Richard Gaitskell Brown University |
| 1/21 | Assembly of Massive Galaxies: Emerging Insights and Outstanding Challenges | Shardha Jogee University of Texas at Austin |
| 1/26 | Atomic-level ordering of complex oxide half-metals for high-performance spin-based electronics | Adam Hauser University of California, Santa Barbara |
| 1/28 | Casimir Energies and Forces: An Accelerating Subject | Kimball Milton University of Oklahoma |
| 2/4 | Cosmological Highlights from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey | David Weinberg Ohio State University |
| 2/9 | Dynamics, Damping, and Spin Transport in Spintronic Thin Film Heterostructures | Carl Boone, Boston University |
| 2/11 | Superluminous Supernovae and LCOGT | Andy Howell, LCOGT/UCSB |
| 2/16 | A Magnetic Majorana Fermion Factory | Hua Chen, University of Texas Austin |
| 2/18 | Light-Matter Interaction and Transport in Quantum Materials: A Spintronics Perspective | Wang-Kong Tse, Los Alamos National Lab |
| 2/23 | Atomically thin semiconductors: new devices and new physics | Hugh Churchill, MIT |
| 3/4 | IceCube: The Beginning of Neutrino Astronomy | Dawn Williams, University of Alabama |
| 3/11 | Black Holes in Horava Gravity | Stefan Janiszewski, University of Victoria, Canada |
| 4/1 | PRIME: Enhancing UA’s Research Enterprise | Jason Scofield, University of Alabama |
| 4/15 | Building the Black Hole in Our Own Backyard | Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, Vanderbilt University |
| 4/22 | Inflationary cosmology and search for the particle physics of the early Universe | Shinsuke, Kawai, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea |