| Sep. 03 |
Dr. Michael Kesdan |
Michael Kesden received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech in 2005 and has been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas since 2013 where he is currently Professor and Undergraduate Program Head of the Department of Physics. His research focuses on two phenomena involving spinning black holes: binary black hole (BBH) mergers and stellar tidal disruption. BBH spins misaligned with their orbital angular momentum cause the latter to precess and nutate about the total angular momentum as the BBHs inspiral towards merger due to gravitational-wave (GW) emission. Dr. Kesden investigates the GW signatures of BBH precession and nutation and how they can be used to distinguish between different astrophysical BBH formation channels. He also studies how black-hole spin affects the tidal disruption and direct capture of stars by supermassive black holes. These determine the observational properties and rates of tidal disruption events as observed in astronomical surveys like the upcoming LSST by the Vera Rubin Observatory. Dr. Kesden is also deeply interested in how technology can promote physics education and outreach and has developed STEPP (Scaffolded Training Environment for Physics Programming) and VIGOR (Virtual Interaction with Gravitational waves to Observe Relativity). STEPP is a series of publicly available education modules to teach algebra-based introductory physics, while VIGOR is an interactive simulation of BBHs and the GWs they emit. This research is supported by NSF and NASA grants. |
UTD |
Identifying Precessional Modulation of Gravitational Waves Emitted During Binary Black-Hole Mergers |
Link |
| Sep. 10 |
Dr. Heidi Wu |
Dr. Heidi Wu is currently an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University. Before moving to Dallas, she was an assistant professor at Boise State University. She held postdoctoral positions at the Ohio State University, Caltech, and the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University. |
SMU |
Probing Cosmic Acceleration with Galaxy Clusters |
Link |
| Sep. 17 |
Dr. Raquel Castillo-Fernandez |
Dr. Raquel Castillo Fernández is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, her research focuses on neutrino physics and specializes on oscillations, uncertainty control and modeling of neutrino interactions. She and her group work for the SBN (Short Baseline Neutrino), DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), and EMPHATIC (Experiment To Measure The Production Of Hadrons At a Testbeam In Chicagoland) experiments and she is also member of the international NuSTEC (Neutrino Scattering Theory and Experimenter Collaboration). Before joining UTA she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Neutrino Division at Fermilab (Chicago) working in the MicroBooNE experiment. She received her Ph.D in Physics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) working in the T2K experiment (Japan) and a bachelor’s degree from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB). She is originally from Barcelona, Spain. |
UTA |
Neutrino Oscillations and the Path to Discovery: Insights from SBN and DUNE |
Link |
| Sep. 24 |
Dr. Ben Jones |
Benjamin J.P. Jones is an Associate Professor of Physics at UTA. He received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis work, which probed the properties of atmospheric neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Telescope and neutrinos from particle accelerators with liquid argon time projection chamber technology, was recognized with the Tanaka Dissertation Award from the American Physical Society. Jones’s research group at UTA focuses on neutrino physics and astrophysics, in particular the nature and size of the mass of the neutrino mass, development of barium tagging for neutrinoless double beta decay, and searches for exotic phenomena such as oscillations of sterile neutrinos. He is co-chair of the Speakers and Readers Committee for the NEXT neutrinoless double beta decay collaboration, served as co-leader of the US Snowmass Process Neutrino Properties Working Group, and is an associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and co-Director of the UTA Center for Advanced Detector Technology. |
UTA |
Super-radiant Neutrino Lasers from Radioactive Condensates |
Link |
| Oct. 01 |
Dr. Ben Rose |
Benjamin Rose, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of physics at Baylor University. He researches Type Ia supernovae, absolute and relative calibration of telescopes, space telescope missions, and large computational analysis. In 2018, he received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, where his dissertation focused on systematic biases of Type Ia supernova distances used in observational cosmology. Since then, he has held positions at Space Telescope Science Institute and Duke University. Dr. Rose joined Baylor University in 2023 and was named as one of four co-principal investigators for the Roman Supernovae Cosmology Project Infrastructure Team. The team is working with NASA to investigate infrastructure solutions to the complex analysis pipelines for the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. |
Baylor University |
Supernova Cosmology and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope |
Link |
| Oct. 08 |
Dr. Fatemeh Bagheri |
Fatemeh (Fatima) Bagheri is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research spans astrophysics, planetary science, and computational physics, with a focus on exoplanet detection and planetary habitability. She earned her first Ph.D. in Astronomy from Sharif University of Technology, where she studied exoplanets detection via gravitational microlensing. She then completed a second Ph.D. in Space Science at the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of solar wind–magnetosphere interactions. As an NSF MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow, she pioneered new approaches to detecting exoplanets through radio emissions during microlensing events and investigated the magnetospheres of exoplanets using advanced MHD modeling. At NASA Goddard, her work bridges space physics and astrophysics, contributing to flagship missions such as the Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. |
NASA |
Magnetospheres: From Models to Detection |
Link |
| Oct. 15 |
Dr. Mei Yuan |
Yuan Mei joined UTA Physics in 2024. His research focuses on developing experimental techniques that push the limits of measurement and information extraction. By advancing sensing, readout, and system-level integration across a wide range of platforms, his work enables new capabilities in both fundamental science and emerging applications. |
UTA |
Noise! |
Link |
| Oct. 22 |
Dr. Xiaojia Zhang |
Dr. Xiaojia Zhang received her Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014, where she studied the generation of electron cyclotron harmonic waves in Earth’s magnetosphere. Following her Ph.D., she continued at UCLA as a researcher, investigating wave–particle interactions in Earth’s inner magnetosphere, magnetotail, and Jupiter’s magnetosphere using data from multiple NASA missions, including the Van Allen Probes, Juno, and UCLA’s first CubeSat mission, ELFIN. In August 2022, Dr. Zhang joined the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Dallas as an Associate Professor. Her research group focuses on charged particle (plasma) dynamics in Earth’s and other planetary magnetospheres, and on how these processes couple the magnetospheres to the ionosphere and the atmosphere. |
UTD |
Dual Role of Geomagnetic Pulsations in Energetic Electron Precipitation into Earth’s Atmosphere |
Link |
| Oct. 29 |
Dr. Jonathan Asaadi |
Dr. Asaadi is currently an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Texas Arlington. Before this he was a postdoctoral researcher with Syracuse University from 2012-2015 working with Prof. Mitch Soderberg. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 from Texas A&M University under Prof. David Toback. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 2004 with a B.S in physics. His current research interests focus on understanding the most abundant massive particle in the universe, the neutrino, and exploring new and novel ideas in instrumentation. |
UTA |
Exploring the uncharted with novel detectors |
Link |
| Nov. 05 |
Dr. Ping Liu |
Professor J. Ping Liu joined the Department of Physics at UT Arlington as an Associate Professor in 2002 and was promoted to Professor in 2008. His research group focuses on the fabrication and characterization of advanced magnetic materials, including hard magnetic nanoparticles and nanocomposites. His work contributes to the development of high-performance permanent magnets used in clean energy applications, such as electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. |
UTA |
Advanced magnetic materials |
Link |
| Nov. 19 |
Dr. Haleh Hadavand |
Dr. Hadavand attended the University of Maryland, College Park, and received her B.S. in Physics with a minor in Mathematics. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, where her research was conducted on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She joined the ATLAS experiment as a postdoc at Southern Methodist University, where she was one of the main developers of ATLAS’s data quality monitoring system for online and offline monitoring and detector commissioning. As a postdoc, she performed searches for extra-dimensional models with photons in the final state. She joined UTA in 2012 and has been focusing on Beyond Standard Model Higgs searches. She was the charged Higgs convenor on ATLAS and has performed searches for H+ → τν and other novel searches for BSM Higgs decays to supersymmetric particles. One of her current searches, H/A → stau stau, where the stau is the supersymmetric partner to the tau lepton, will be the first of its kind at the Large Hadron Collider and will probe the Higgs coupling to SUSY particles. She also leads the Low Voltage Power Supply upgrade project, producing a radiation-hard design for the Tile Hadronic Calorimeter, a major subdetector of the ATLAS detector, for the High Luminosity LHC era. |
UTA |
Journey in the Search for Beyond Standard Model Physics: From Quantum Entanglement, B Mesons, and BSM Higgs searches |
Link |
