Department of Physics

Professor Ann Nelson, who held the Kenneth K. Young Chair of Physics and was a tireless advocate for diversity in the field, died from a fall while backpacking in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness on August 4, 2019. Professor Nelson was a brilliant theoretical physicist who specialized in particle physics and cosmology and had been at the University of Washington since 1994. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a recipient of the J.J. Sakurai prize for theoretical particle physics from the American Physical Society.

Lukasz Fidkowski, an assistant professor of physics at the UW, is one of the winners of a 2020 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation. 

The theoretical particle physicist Ann Nelson, who died on August 4 at age 61, was a font of brilliant ideas and a champion of ending discrimination in the field.

Celebrate the accomplishments of the 2019 Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities undergraduate researchers, attend Bulrusher - directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, and more!

Christopher Phillips, a research specialist in the Department of Physics, explains why there will be ideal conditions for stargazing in August. 

From becoming an accomplished physicist to summiting mountains, Dr. Nelson spent her life focused on the next goal — and on giving others a hand along the way.

Doctoral student Jared Canright is exploring the potential of virtual reality to explain physics concepts to UW undergraduates. 

The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers is the highest honor given by the U.S. government to early career scientists and engineers.

UW honors longtime Harvard professor and one of America's leading climate change scientists, James Anderson (BS, Physics, 1966).

Selected from 1,223 nominees from across the country, Natural Sciences undergraduates Chris Moore and Irika Sinha were named Goldwater Scholars.

Thouless was a theoretical physicist whose most well-known work focused on the properties of matter in extremely thin layers.  

Learn about how this exciting new coalition aimed at bringing about a revolution in quantum research and technology.

Shih-Chieh Hsu, associate professor of physics at UW, and the rest of the FASER team seek to answer one of the outstanding questions in particle physics: What is dark matter made of?

A team of UW-led physicists reports that it has developed a new system to trap individual excitons — bound pairs of electrons and their associated positive charges

UW physicist Jiun-Haw Chu named Packard Fellow for research on quantum materials.