A Message from Physics Leadership

Dear friends,
 
It is my pleasure to reach out to you as the new chair of the Physics Department. It is an honor to serve in this role. I will do everything I can to support the department in its ambitions: achieving excellence in research and teaching, cultivating a place where people thrive, and producing scientific breakthroughs while providing outstanding educational opportunities for the future STEM workforce. As we work together toward these goals, the dedication of our colleagues, postdoctoral fellows, students, and staff is essential–as is your support. Our physics community is grateful for every gift we receive.

I am excited to share highlights from our department this year. Our past interim chair, Professor Lu Li, was named a 2026 Brown Investigator. He will use the award to develop new methods for thermal transport and resonance measurements in high magnetic fields to probe the electronic states of insulators. Assistant Professor Na Hyun Jo was selected as a 2026 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. This is a very special award that honors commitment and achievements in both research and teaching. We also celebrated that Professor Tim Chupp and members of his research team were awarded a share in the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as part of the Muon g-2 Collaborations at CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Fermilab.

Hiring new faculty members is pivotal for shaping physics at Michigan in the coming years. However, the increased cost of startup funding limits our ability to make competitive offers and hire at the scale needed to significantly strengthen the department for the future. Therefore, gifts to support the frontiers of scientific exploration through the Physics Strategic Fund are vital to the department’s success going forward.

Your crucial support helps us provide transformative research opportunities, structure a curriculum that prepares our students for modern scientific careers, and engage the public through outreach activities. Gifts for this can, for example, be made to the Physics Graduate Support Fund or to Saturday Morning Physics. Please consider making a donation to one of these important causes.

For more news and information about the department, please visit our website. You’re also welcome to contact me at [email protected] if you’d like to visit our department or discuss a gift of your time. 

Thank you for your generosity. Go Blue! 

Henriette Elvang
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Oskar Klein Collegiate Professor of Physics