In the 2010 rankings of graduate programs across the United States, announced by U. S. News & World Reporton 15 April 2010, to appear in the 27 April 2010 issue, Michigan State University's Nuclear Physics program was ranked number one, after several years of placing second behind MIT.

In April 2009, two Physics/Astronomy juniors, Nathan Sanders and Jessica Muir, were named Goldwater Scholars for 2009-10.

The long wait is over! Collisions were observed in the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Monday, November 23. A picture of the first collision is shown above. This event, along with almost all of the events taken by ATLAS so far, was triggered by the MBTS (Minimum Bias Trigger Scintillators), constructed at MSU and installed at CERN (the signals from the MBTS counters can be observed as the yellow quadrangles in the top left).

On 11 December 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science named Michigan State University as the site for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a proposed new $550 million facility for conducting cutting-edge research in nuclear physics and astrophysics, with potential applications in medicine and materials science to go along with its contributions toward advancing pure scientific knowledge.

In 2008, MSU Physicist Named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

April 29, 2008: In a ceremony in the MSU Abrams Planetarium, Dr. Chih-Wei Lai was installed as the first “Jerry Cowen Chair of Experimental Physics”. The Chair’s donor and Jerry Cowen’s son, Randy Cowen, two daughters of Jerry’s, as well as his widow Elaine, were in attendance to help celebrate the occasion.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the National Super-conducting Cyclotron Laboratory at MSU more than $100 million to fund operations through 2011, highlighting the lab's status as a world-leading nuclear science facility.

Arden Bement, director of NSF, will visit East Lansing today to formally acknowledge the grant renewal, which will allow the cyclotron laboratory to continue pushing the frontiers of knowledge in rare isotope science, training the nation's next generation of nuclear scientists, and attracting undergraduate students to basic science.

New York City, January 5, 2005: Randy Cowen adds $1,000,000 to the endowment fund he created to establish the Cowen Chair, an endowed chair in experimental condensed matter physics in memory of his father, long-time MSU physics/astronomy faculty member Jerry Cowen