Featured

  • Firas Mansour standing outdoors in winter

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    Winter 2022

    In memory of Firas Mansour

    An exceptional teacher and colleague, Firas dedicated his professional life to physics education and to the well-being of his students. With a larger than life personality replete with wit and charm, Firas had a passion for physics and physics education. He will be sorely missed.


    Category: Featured
  • Satter Taheri-Araghi works with students in his lab

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    Sattar Taheri-Araghi

    Research in experimental biology

    During his PhD studies in Waterloo Sattar Taheri Araghi studied antimicrobial peptides, now he is a faculty member at CSUN


    Category: Featured Alumni Profiles
  • Anna Golubeva

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    Graduate student in a quest to learn how machine learning works

    Anna Golubeva, PhD student in theoretical condensed matter physics at U. of Waterloo, works in the group of Prof. Roger Melko who was recently awarded a prestigious Vanier fellowship


    Category: Featured Meet our Students
  • Roger and Giacomo sit on the stairs in PI

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    Artificial intelligence teaches itself to solve gnarly quantum challenges

    Rather than battle it out to obsolescence, new research shows how quantum and classical systems can evolve together.


    Category: Featured Recent research
  • math written on glass

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    Fall 2018

    SIN Bin

    2016, problem 3

    Can you solve it? The Sir Isaac Newton Exam, as we all know and love it, continues to offer challenging problems to high school students around the world. Flex your Physics brains with this problem from the 2018 Sir Isaac Newton Exam!


    Category: SIN bin Featured
  • Department faculty group photo

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    Fall 2018

    Message from the Chair

    One of the most satisfying rewards for serving as department chair has been the opportunity to meet many of you and to hear what you are up to. Whether its research on string theory, market research, banking, teaching, or founding a startup, I’m amazed at the breadth of accomplishment our graduates have enjoyed.


    Category: Featured Message from the Chair
  • Rohan Jayasundera

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    Fall 2018

    36 years went by too fast!

    Join us on December 5th at 4pm to celebrate Rohan

    When asked what he would miss most about the department, Rohan replied that the support he received from all levels including the department chairs, and the administrative staff, but most of all, the students. Rohan is a special educator who has touched the lives of thousands of students and has left them with a positive memory of their time at the University of Waterloo.


    Category: New and Noteworthy Featured
  • Will Percival

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    Fall 2018

    Professor Will Percival

    Distinguished Research Chair in Astrophysics in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Waterloo

    The University of Waterloo's newly created Distinguished Chair in Astrophysics, Prof. Will Percival, coming from the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, is leading an effort to understand why the Universal expansion is accelerating.


    Category: Featured Campus Connections
  • Zahra Fakhraai

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    Fall 2018

    Zahra Fakhraai

    Zahra Fakhraai is the recipient of 2015 Sloan fellowship in Chemistry, 2017 Journal of Physical Chemistry B Lectureship Award, and 2017 University of Waterloo Young Alumni award. Zahra identifies as a material scientist interested in materials properties in small length scales and extremely slow dynamics.


    Category: Featured Alumni Profiles
  • Emily Pass looks through a telescope

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    Fall 2018

    Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy student wins co-op triple crown

    Emily Pass, now a fourth-year undergraduate co-op student in the department of Physics and Astronomy won faculty, provincial and national Co-op Student of the Year Awards in March 2018. This co-op triple crown award was given for the work Emily did developing a data analysis program that rapidly detects objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space beyond Neptune. Emily acknowledges her long term passion in Astronomy combined with Physics education  she obtained at Waterloo for her success leading to “wonderful opportunities and possibilities” for the future career growth.


    Category: Featured Meet our Students
  • 5 of 6 2018 Vanier winners

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    Fall 2018

    Vanier Scholarship Success for our Graduate Students

    Out of the about 160 scholarships awarded each year nationwide over all fields, five of our students have been awarded in this funding round.


    Category: Featured Meet our Students
  • representation of analytical method

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    Fall 2018

    Alzheimer's disease: one lipid bilayer at a time

    Dr. Zoya Leonenko and her research group are using atomic force microscopy to study neuronal membranes, producing results that suggest the mechanisms that trigger Alzheimer's Disease.


    Category: Featured Recent research
  • graph showing special temperatures in frustrated ferromagnets

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    Fall 2018

    Telltales of frustrated interactions

    In a recent Nature Communications paper, Gingras and collaborators exposed in a spin ice material — a system in which the microscopic atomic magnetic moments experience frustrated interactions, and closely mimic the behaviour of the protons in common water ice — an heretofore unnoticed analogy with classical gases.


    Category: Featured Recent research
  • Physics equations being written on glass

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    Fall 2018

    SIN Bin

    2018, problem 12

    Can you solve it? The Sir Isaac Newton Exam, as we all know and love it, continues to offer challenging problems to high school students around the world. Flex your Physics brains with this problem from the 2018 Sir Isaac Newton Exam!


    Category: SIN bin Featured