Highlights

2021

  • April 2021: Jacob Wemhoner and Michael Taylor present their research projects at NMT's Student Research Symposium.

  • April 2021: Alex Attanasio successfully defended his MS Thesis titled "An Electrostatic Model of Fast Breakdown as a System of Streamers".

  • March 2021: Dr. da Silva receives the competitive NSF CAREER Award. Details are given in this press release.

  • February 2021: Luis Contreras-Vidal's paper on the relationship between sprite current and morphology has just been published in JGR Space Physics.

2020

  • December 2020: Dr. da Silva co-organized the panel Atmospheric and Space Electricity Student and Early Career Event: Career Opportunities Panel at the 2020 Virtual AGU Fall Meeting.

  • September 2020: Dr. da Silva received a Young Scientist Award from the International Radio Science Union (URSI).

  • April 2020: John Pantuso received NMT Physics' Brook Award, and Alex Attanasio received NMT Physics' Petschek Award.

2019

  • December 2019: The multiple grants that our team has received from the NM Space Grant / NM NASA EPSCoR office have been highlighted in this article.

  • August 2019: Our student, Sophia Salazar, has been awarded a NM Space Grant Undergraduate Research Fellowship to study lightning effects in the lower ionosphere.

  • July 2019: Our student, Alex Attanasio, has just published his first article on the Journal of Geophysical Research. Alex will start his M.S. program in the upcoming Fall semester. This article is one of two papers our team has published in JGR this Summer. The other one can be found here.

  • June 2019: Our team has just been awarded a major NSF grant to study the mechanism of runaway electron acceleration in lightning and laboratory electrical discharges.

  • May 2019: Our student, Sophia Salazar, is spending this Summer at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

  • May 2019: Our team has just been awarded a grant from the NM EPSCoR State Office to study lightning effects on SMART grids.

  • March 2019: Our student, John Pantuso, has been recently awarded a New Mexico Space Grant Undergraduate Research Fellowship to study runaway electron acceleration in lightning and laboratory discharges.

  • January 2019: Our student, Sophia Salazar, is attending the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics in Logan, UT. She is representing NMT at the conference as the only participation from our institution, and presenting her research in lightning physics.

2018

  • December 2018: Out team has been awarded a Research Infrastructure Development Award from the NM NASA EPSCoR office to unravel the energetic and chemical impacts of lightning in the Earth's atmosphere.

  • May 2018: Our paper on wave-particle interactions in the Earth's radiation belts has just been published on GRL. This is our group's first paper at NMT.

  • January 2018: I'm starting today as an Assistant Professor of Physics at New Mexico Tech. I'll also be teaching PHYS 122 – General Physics II this Spring. The textbook for this course is free and it can be downloaded here: https://openstax.org/details/books/university-physics-volume-2