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

The University of Kentucky has announced recipients of the 2024 Faculty Awards. The College will have an awards program and reception in early fall to recognize the recipients. More information will follow soon.

2024 College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Awards recipients are: 

Outstanding Teaching Award

Excellence in Teaching Large Courses Award

Innovative Teaching Award

Outstanding Undergraduate

By Jenny Wells-Hosley

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 29, 2024) — On Monday, April 8,sky gazers across North America will be treated to a total solar eclipse. During a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the planet and temporarily blocking the sun's light. Weather permitting, this event creates an awe-inspiring display as the sky darkens and the sun's corona becomes visible.

Like the rest of the continent, the University of Kentucky and Lexington are gearing up for this rare natural phenomenon. However, it's important to note that Lexington will only experience approximately 97% coverage. While that might sound good enough, experts in the UK Department of Physics and

By Jennifer T. Allen, Hannah Edelen, Jenny Wells-Hosley and Richard LeComte

As humans search for intelligent life–or any life at all—in the universe, they’re using their own intelligence to craft new ways of exploring galaxies. They’re even starting to use artificial intelligence, itself a new frontier, to deepen science’s understanding of what lies beyond.

That’s where Yuanyuan Su, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is applying her own intelligence. She and her group are using artificial intelligence to analyze images gathered from the space and ground telescopes to figure out what’s actually there.

Su has received the 2024 Early Career Prize from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. The 

Nikhil Ajgaonkar (Yan) – “Constraining the Star Formation Histories of Galaxies in the Swift/UVOT+MaNGA (SwiM) Value-added Catalog.” Now a PTD Module and Integration Yield Engineer at Intel (Oregon).

Mojtaba Behzadipour (Plaster) – “Simulation and Data Analysis of nEDM@SNS Experiment in Presence of Time-Varying Magnetic Field.” Now a Postdoc at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jared S Brewington (Plaster) – “Design of the B0 and Spin-Transport Magnetic Field Coils for the Los Alamos National Lab Neutron Electric Dipole Moment Experiment.” Now a Senior Electromagnetics Engineer, Resonant Link (Vermont, but working remotely in Greensboro, NC).

Abel Manuel Lorente Campos (

Professor Susan Gardner was awarded the University of Kentucky’s Albert and Elizabeth Kirwan Memorial Prize. The prize is bestowed each year to a faculty member in recognition of their outstanding contributions to original research or scholarship, with an emphasis on work produced four years prior to the award. Below is Professor Gardner’s description of her recent research. 

I thank my faculty colleagues for recognizing my research accomplishments with the 2022 Albert and Elizabeth Kirwan Memorial Prize. My research concerns the theoretical investigation of "fundamental symmetries,'' and their violation, to the end of identifying and interpreting new physical phenomena. In the last years,

In 2023, Professor Gary Ferland, already a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the first member of our faculty to receive this honor.  AAAS cited his development of the synthesis code “Cloudy”, which is used to simulate spectra of astronomical objects.  Gary wrote the following overview of astronomy at UK and the role of Cloudy.

The astronomy group has long been noted for its strong theoretical side. Moshe Elitzur, recently retired, was an accomplished particle theorist before moving over to astronomy. His work on interstellar

David Hume (B.S. ’02) attended graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and conducted his Ph.D. research in (future Nobel laureate) David Wineland’s lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder. After a post-doc appointment at the University of Heidelberg, he returned to NIST to continue his research on high precision measurements of trapped ions, in particular the use of aluminum ions as atomic clocks.

Physics seniors and Society of Physics Student officers Anthony Kelly and Gabija Ziemyte had the opportunity to ask Dr. David Hume a few questions when he visited the University of Kentucky to give a departmental colloquium in November of 2022. Below are edited excerpts from Anthony

I joined the University of Kentucky’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in the fall of 2008 as a Ph.D. student. From the very first day, it was a wonderful journey for me as an international student, and the department helped me tremendously to shape my academic career as a particle physicist alongside making long term, solid friendships.

Currently, I am a Assistant Professor in High Energy Physics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. At the University of Kentucky, I pursued theoretical particle physics, precisely lattice QCD under the supervision of Professor Keh-Fei Liu. Lattice QCD provides a successful first-principles, highly computational framework to study the dynamics of quarks and gluons, which are subatomic fundamental particles glued together by a strong

When joining the University of Kentucky physics department as a graduate student in 2006, I knew that I enjoyed doing experimental research but had not yet settled on a research topic. With the wide variety of research topics being pursued at UK, it was an ideal place to spend my first two semesters learning more before starting my research in the summer of 2007 in Dr. Joe Brill’s lab. What caught my interest was electrical conduction through organic molecular materials, which was the topic of my research for my Ph.D. and which I continue to study as a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD.

The charge and energy carriers in organic semiconductors act differently than standard semiconductors, such as Si, but can