Physics has long suffered from the perception that the most cutting-edge work is done by lone geniuses, usually white men. It’s a bias that’s seeped into how instructors interact with their students, and even into how students think about themselves. Prior research has shown that female students who get A’s in introductory physics think they’re as good at physics as male students who get C’s.
The GRFP is a prestigious program that supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 100 NSF-supported STEM fields. NSF selects a pool of about 2,000 fellowships from 14,000 applicants. These fellowships serve as three years of financial support that can be used over a five-year period at accredited U.S. institutions, including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost-of-education allowance of $12,000 that graduate institutions agree to accept in lieu of charging tuition and fees.
When a single bacterial cell divides into two during periods of rapid growth, it doesn’t split in half once it reaches a predetermined size. Instead, data has shown, a cell will divide once it has added a certain amount of mass.
The two processes sound similar, but they each carry different risks. Many researchers believed it was a safer bet for the cell if it split once it reached a certain size.
“After working with students here at Pitt for more than a decade helping to design the DESI survey, it is extremely exciting to see the beautiful results coming out of just the first year’s worth of data,” said Jeffrey A. Newman, professor of physics and astronomy in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Newman was a member of the team that designed the DESI survey.
The 17th annual Pitt Sustainability Symposium is happening on April 19th. The Symposium will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Ohara Student Center Ballroom. It will feature student capstone presentations from two sustainability courses and the Pitt Sustainability Awards will be held at noon. You can register for the event here.
The Dietrich School is excited to announce the launch of a new peer-reviewed open-access journal, the Pittsburgh Interdisciplinary Mathematics Review (PIMR), the first collaborative effort between the School’s Department of Mathematics and the University of Pittsburgh Library System. You can access the entire first issue at pimr.pitt.edu.
Dietrich School students spent Monday, April 8 in the Texas Hill Country studying shadow bands during the solar eclipse. Sarah Boden, a reporter with Pittsburgh’s WESA, tagged along for an episode of NPR’s Short Wave podcast.
Join the Dietrich School's Department of Economics for the next part of their McKay Lecture series sponsored by the McKay Fund. The lecture is on March 29 from 2-3:30 p.m in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium and is open to the public. This year’s lecturer is John A. List who will be speaking on the topic “Leveraging Private Sector Data to Help Inform Major Social Challenges.”
The Pitt Momentum Funds are a collaboration between the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and the Office of the Provost and support researchers and scholars in fields from creative arts and humanities to the social sciences, to STEM and the health sciences.
The three-tiered structure of the awards makes it possible to fund work at all stages of the research cycle:
