Latest News
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Boris Shraiman elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences
Boris Shraiman has been elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
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KITP Receives Generous Gift to the Family Fund
Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Troxel have made a generous gift of $30,000 for the KITP Family Fund. Douglas is the founder of Serena Software, a global provider of infrastructure software. He joined the KITP Director's Council in 2009, has a passion for physics and a B.S. in mathematics from Iowa State University. He and his wife Deborah, a Santa Barbara native who studied biology at UCSB, live in Hawaii most of the year, when not in Santa Barbara or traveling.
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WRITERS AND SCIENCE: THE STAR CONFERENCE
Scientific discoveries are increasingly in the news, but are increasingly complex while their impact on our lives is profound. The need for communicating science across the intellectual spectrum is imperative, and increasingly ideas from science are integrated into film, fiction, plays and other non-scientific writing. In 2002 the Templeton Lectures were presented at the KITP to packed audiences, and in 2005 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation sponsored the prestigious conference Science Theater Audience Reader (STAR): Theoretical Physics in Drama and Narrative. Playwrights, actors, literature and drama scholars, novelists, biographers and science journalists explored the means by which science concepts are conveyed to the public in a variety of media. Among conference participants were Alan Lightman. Rebecca Goldstein, Peter Galison, Lauren Gunderson, Dennis Overbye and Anthony Zee.
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Likely Discovery of Faint and Fast Supernova Confirms Predicted Explosion
An explosion—observable in theory, but never seen on the night sky–emerged a little over two years ago from calculations carried out by a team of astrophysicists, including KITP permanent member Lars Bildsten and postdoctoral fellow Nevin Weinberg, as well as UCSB physics graduate student Ken Shen and Bildsten's long-time Dutch collaborator Gijs Nelemans of Radboud University in Nijmegen. Those calculations enabled the team to predict the existence, in distant galaxies, of a new kind of exploding star or "supernova" that would— when detected—be fainter than most observed supernovae and would rise and fall in brightness in only a few weeks.
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When Collaborators Are a Couple: Globular Clusters Provide Case Study
He was an assistant professor at MIT; she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. They met at one scientific conference, and married at another (the latter, at least, in scenic Aspen).
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