University of Mississippi Women in Physics

03/08/2022

Happy International Women's Day!

To celebrate women in STEM, check out the article below on Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkins' contributions to astronomy! Her thesis has been called "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy" as it concluded that hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in stars. This makes them the most abundant element in the Universe!

What are the stars made of? At 25, Cecilia Payne answered this fundamental question in her Ph.D. thesis.

03/03/2022

Happy Women's History Month! Let’s kick off by learning more about Mary Golda Ross:

“Born in 1908, Ross was a Native American and member of the Cherokee Nation. After earning a master's degree in 1938, she eventually moved to California in 1941, where landed a job as a mathematician at Lockheed, working on the P-38 Lightning fighter plane. She worked her way up the ranks at Lockheed and become the only woman among on the original team at Skunk Works.
As a mathematician and engineer, she wrote a number of professional and theoretical works and was one of the authors of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III, about space travel to Mars and Venus.”

Who was Mary Ross? Another 'hidden figure,' a mathematician and engineer.

05/04/2021

UMWiP wants to congratulate Dr. Meghan Bhattacharya for successfully defending her thesis on the "Search for CPT and Lorentz Invariance Violantion in the Muon g-2 Experiment at Fermilab." She will start a postdoctoral position with the Fermilab Scientific Computing Division in the neutrino program. Congratulations!!

10/06/2020

“I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done.” - Andrea Ghez

03/03/2020

02/24/2020

UMWiP is saddened to hear of the passing of Katherine Johnson. To learn a little bit more about her, check out the following article.

She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

11/18/2019

Get ready for the last Oxford Science Cafe of the semester! Join us at Uptown Coffee at 6pm!

OXFORD, Miss. – The rapidly diminishing ability of male crickets in Hawaii to chirp, which is part of their mating ritual, is the topic of the final Oxford Science Cafe of the fall semester. The monthly event, sponsored by the University of Mississippi Department of Physics and Astronomy and the ...