MSU Physics and Astronomy Assistant Professors Sean Couch and Chris Wrede are among the 49 scientists nationwide to be selected by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science to receive significant funding for their research as part of the DOE's 2016 Early Career Research Program. Of these 49 recipients, 27 are from U.S universities and 22 are from DOE's national laboratories.

Advances in the speed of computer hardware have been accompanied by massive increases in the amount of memory which the faster processors can handle. While these advances enable systems to process larger and more detailed sets of data ranging from scientific analysis to website content to online gaming to streaming video, the vast amount of information needs to be stored for access, and that takes a considerable amount of electrical power.

MSU Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Kendall Mahn has been named a recipient of a 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship.

The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. They provide $55,000 of research funding over the two years of the fellowship.

Physics and Astronomy Professor Mark Voit is one of ten MSU Faculty members to receive one of this year's ten William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Awards.

Richard Lunt, a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, received one of this year's six Teacher-Scholar Awards.

MSU Physics and Astronomy theoretical nuclear physics graduate student Amy Lowell was among the six new recipients of the U. S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship this year.

MSU Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Jaideep Singh's research into magnetizing the inert gases helium and xenon for use in enhancing MRI scans, especially for the lungs, is featured in a December 9th MSU Today article.

The online magazine "The Conversation" published an article on 13 November 2015 by MSU Physics & Astronomy Associate Professor Tyce DeYoung describing research with the IceCube experiment at the South Pole, which uses a billion tons of Antarctic ice to detect the by-products of high energy neutrino collisions.

A November 3rd, 2015, MSU Today article highlights a set of computational results newly released by an international team of theoretical nuclear physicists including MSU Physics & Astronomy Professors Witold Nazarewicz and Morten Hjorth-Jensen.