By Jenny Wells-Hosley 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 7, 2025) — When the sun dips below the horizon and the stars emerge over Lexington, the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences’ SkyTalk program invites the community to gather, look up and wonder — together.

For nearly two decades, the monthly talks have drawn people of all ages — from middle school students to retirees — to UK’s MacAdam Student Observatory to explore the mysteries of the cosmos

By Jenny Wells-Hosley 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 19, 2025) — University of Kentucky physics and astronomy professor Gary J. Ferland, Ph.D., has been named the 2025 recipient of the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

The Bruce Medal, first awarded in 1898, recognizes a lifetime of achievement and contributions to astrophysics research. Past recipients include such influential scientists in astronomy as Edwin Hubble, Vera Rubin and Nobel laureates Hans Bethe and Willy Fowler.

Ferland, who has taught at UK’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences for more than four decades, is best known for

By Jenny Wells-Hosley and Tracy Marc 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 3, 2025) — A team of faculty, postdoctoral scholars and students from the University of Kentucky Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences has contributed to the groundbreaking final result in the ongoing Muon g-2 experiment at

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 15, 2025) — In celebration of University of Kentucky alumnus Bill Roark’s retirement, Starfish Holdings is providing $50,000 gift to establish an endowed scholarship in his name.

The Bill Roark Endowed Science Scholarship will support students pursuing degrees in scientific disciplines — students, like Roark, who are driven by curiosity, perseverance and purpose. The endowment will be housed in 

At the start of ’01 I was a full-time database administrator at Yorkshire Global Restaurants and a part-time engineering student at the University of Kentucky. I had my whole life planned: finish my degree to make myself more marketable, keep working in IT where I was making a good salary, and retire early. It was a good plan. But then I took two physics courses in Winter ‘01 – and my life was upended. I thought those courses, Modern Physics and Condensed Matter Physics, were painful but beautiful, and fascinating, and … well I guess I was falling in love with physics. Even better than the coursework, the instructor for Condensed Matter Physics, Prof. Yuri Sushko, invited me to do research with him and I found myself spending several hours a week in his lab. By the end of that semester I decided to become a physicist. A little over a year later I had quit my job and become a physics

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, I went to college on a music scholarship. After one semester I left college and joined a rock and roll band. Eventually, I realized my musical capabilities were limited, so I returned to school. I received a Scholarship from Westinghouse to Marshall University and received my BS in Physics in 1981. Enrolling at the University of Kentucky, I was able to apply for and receive a research assistantship in Professor Peter Eklund’s laboratories where I began conducting research involving the optical and structural properties of materials. In addition to my dissertation research topic on graphite intercalation compounds, I was fortunate to collaborate on other materials such as the search for charge density waves in potassium with Prof. Albert W. Oberhauser (Purdue University), metal insulator phase transitions in vanadium

Before coming to the University of Kentucky, I studied physics at the University of Geneseo in Upstate New York. I started college as an engineering major but was sufficiently intrigued by physics and I changed my major. The chair of our department, Dr Jerry Reber, received his PhD in nuclear physics running experiments on the Van de Graaff Accelerator in the 1960s at the University of Kentucky. Due to Dr Reber’s recommendation, I applied to the University of Kentucky in 1992. In the summer of 1993, I entered the state of Kentucky for the very first time with everything I owned packed into my pickup truck having selected Kentucky to pursue a PhD in Physics.

My original plan was to pursue a nuclear physics degree. Sean Cornett, Crystal Brogan, Tim Simmons, I, and others spent countless hours reading our textbooks by Jackson and Goldstein for instance and

My visit to the University of Kentucky in the spring of 2012 was timed perfectly: I was in town for the decisive Sweet Sixteen victory over Indiana, Paul Steinhardt delivered the van Winter Lecture detailing his adventures searching for natural quasicrystals, and the burst of spring throughout the campus and downtown triggered hometown nostalgia that I hadn’t realized I had been missing in Buffalo. Lexington was alight with the fire of life (and couches), and as I headed back to the airport, I knew I’d return in the fall to pursue my graduate studies. Unbeknownst to me, however, I would depart from the experimental condensed matter physics work I’d started with my advisor at SUNY Buffalo State, Prof. Ram Rai (UK Ph.D. ’04). Instead, I began working with Prof. Christopher Crawford in experimental nuclear physics, a

By Jenny Wells-Hosley 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 15, 2025) — A new study by University of Kentucky researchers is helping change how scientists understand and control magnetic energy and could lead to faster, more efficient electronic devices.

Led by Ambrose Seo, Ph.D., a professor in the University of Kentucky Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, the study recently was published in Nature Communications. Seo is also the principal investigator

By Ben Branscum, Tom Musgrave and Jenny Wells-Hosley 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 6, 2025) — When Asa O’Neal arrived at the University of Kentucky in 2021, he didn’t have a clear plan, but he knew he was in the right place to figure it out.

“My mother and grandmother went here, so UK felt a little like home,” said O'Neal, a West Liberty native. “But at the end of the day, it was about what [UK] had to offer. It was a huge university where I could do anything I wanted.”

Originally a chemical engineering major, O’Neal, also a member of the

By Richard LeComte 

LEXINGTON, Ky, -- The University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences is presenting three SkyTalks in the upcoming weeks courtesy of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the MacAdam Student Observatory.

SkyTalks feature UK faculty members delivering a 40-minute presentation followed by a chance to visit the MacAdam observatory, depending on the weather.

Here are three upcoming events: 

7 p.m. Thursday, March 13, Chem-Phys Room 287: “Wham, Bamb, Earth in a Jam? Near Earth Asteroids and a Close Shave for 2032," presented by Tom Troland, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. 

A recently discovered asteroid will make a close passage by Earth on December 22, 2032. Will it hit Earth? Very likely not, but it will be a close shave. This chunk of solar system debris,

After my baseball career down the road at the road at Georgetown College fizzled out, I transferred to UK in the fall of 2009. This change brought me to the UK’s Physics and Astronomy department and changed the trajectory of my career. I participated in some exciting astronomy research with Dr. Wilhelm at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, I struggled through Dr. Gardner’s quantum class , presented research at a conference in Hawaii, and received funding to attend the International Space University through UK’s Huffaker Scholarship and the American Astronautical Society Scholarship. 

After graduating in 2011, I had a brief internship working on Space Policy at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation in Washington, DC. Once that was completed, I packed my bags and spent the summer at the International Space University (ISU) in Graz, Austria.

I joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kentucky as a graduate student in the fall of 1993. I arrived there after a gap of about four years after my undergraduate studies. I graduated from the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1989, the year of the great transformations in Eastern Europe that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before that time, the very idea of studying abroad was an inaccessible dream for most people in my country because of the near complete interdiction to travel abroad imposed by the dictatorship. So, the simple fact that I found myself in Lexington, KY, USA, on a university campus to embark on Ph.D. studies, felt very special and almost miraculous to me. 

I had a broad interest in theoretical high-energy physics, but I was not really focused on a particular topic. After some exploration, I

Before entering the University of Kentucky in the fall of 2010, I had some prior exposure to experimental condensed matter research but knew I had much to learn for understanding its intricate theory. So, I focused on my coursework for the first year and a half in graduate school and was fortunate to have both incredibly knowledgeable faculty and a strong supportive group of peers that enriched the educational journey. By the summer of 2012, I decided to join Prof. Ambrose Seo’s thin film oxides lab. I was specifically interested in the emergent phenomena stemming from the strong spin-orbit coupling inherent in 5d transition metals. In addition to the strong spin-orbit coupling term, the ground state of 5d transition metal oxides is highly amenable to electron-electron correlation, an experimentally tunable parameter. The

Assistant Professor Ryan Sanders joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the fall of 2023.  He completed a B.S. degree in physics at the University of Louisville in 2012.  He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2018 before moving to the University of California, Davis, as a postdoctoral scholar.  In 2020, Dr. Sanders was awarded a prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship which he held at UC Davis until he joined the University of Kentucky in 2023.

Dr. Sanders’s research program focuses on understanding the population of galaxies in the Universe, their origin, and the physical mechanisms that control their change and growth over time; a field of astronomy known as galaxy formation and evolution.   Some open questions in this field include: What physical mechanisms control galaxy

Chunli Huang brings a rich background in theoretical condensed matter physics from around the globe. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, and raised in Malaysia, Huang earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Material Science and Engineering from the National University of Singapore and completed his Ph.D. at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He held two postdoctoral positions—first at the University of Texas at Austin under a Ministry of Science and Technology fellowship from Taiwan, followed by a one-year stint at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Huang's research primarily focuses on theoretical approaches to uncover new phenomena and states of matter in condensed matter physics. He has substantial experience in areas such as magnetism, superconductivity, effects of disorder in two dimensional materials. One unique aspect of his pedagogical approach includes

By Professor Terry Draper

With the recent retirement of Professor Keh-Fei Liu (see the Chair’s welcoming remarks in the Spring 2023 newsletter), it is apropos to reflect on some of the history of the lattice QCD group at the University of Kentucky, which formed upon his partnership with yours truly who joined the department’s faculty in 1989. Within the past decade or two, most of our lattice QCD work has been done within the international χQCD collaboration, which has been comprised mostly of our current and former postdocs and students, and their postdocs and students, who are in faculty and postdoc positions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the accepted theory of the strong (nuclear) force, which together with the weak and electromagnetic forces is described theoretically within the Standard Model of

By Tom Musgrave 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 2, 2024) — Asa O’Neal, a University of Kentucky senior mechanical engineering and physics major, was named to the 2024 Astronaut Scholars class by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. The West Liberty, Kentucky, native is one of 71 Astronaut Scholars and was recently honored at the ASF Innovators Symposium and Gala in Houston. 

“Receiving the Astronaut Scholarship is an incredible

By Emily Sallee 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 22, 2024) — The University of Kentucky Office of Nationally Competitive Awards has announced that three UK students have been awarded Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships:

Kachroo, O’Neal and Yang are among 438 students selected nationwide to receive the 2024-25 scholarship. This year’s recipients were selected from a pool of 1,353

By Lindsay Travis 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 18, 2024) — Two University of Kentucky researchers have been named American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows, a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.

Pradeep Kachroo, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology in the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, and Yang-Tse Cheng, Ph.D., the Frank J. Derbyshire Professor of Materials Engineering in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy in the