KITP News Archive

Postdoctoral scholar pushes beyond the boundaries of physics with his Café KITP talk on the brain’s physical structure
Read more

Sonia Fernandez, UCSB Public Affairs
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2018

My journey in Physics started in my home country of Cameroon, completing a Master in Physics at the University of Buea in 2013 on the modelling of nerve impulses in biological neural networks. I then obtained a postgraduate diploma scholarship to study Condensed Matter Physics at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).
Read more

Estelle Inack, Perimeter Institute
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

Ten years before the detection of gravitational waves, two KITP postdocs had a novel idea.
Read more

Harrison Tasoff, UCSB Public Affairs
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

Each summer, the Santa Barbara Advanced School of Quantitative Biology runs alongside a KITP biology program, distinguishing itself by linking the program’s critical discussion and exploration of important theoretical topics to the lab projects.
Read more

Honour McCann, Massey University’s New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

One of KITP’s goals is to bring together theorists and experimentalists with different expertise to intensively study important issues
Read more

Jennifer Johnson, Ohio State University and Inese Ivans, University of Utah
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

Our Fall 2018 KITP program “Chaos and Order: from Strongly Correlated Systems to Black Holes” was triggered by progress that occurred in two distinct steps over a period of more than twenty years. A paper in 1993 and a series of talks at KITP in 2015! These remarkable insights are now referred to as the SYK (Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev) model.
Read more

Mark Bowick, KITP Deputy Director
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

Scientists have known for a long time that nature is quantum, following physical principles — at the atomic and molecular levels — that to the naked eye would seem counterintuitive and downright surreal.
Read more

Sonia Fernandez, UCSB Public Affairs
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

Carlos Marquez wasn’t too long returned from a four-year stint with the U.S. Army and looking for steady work when his brother referred him to his own employer, UC Santa Barbara. It’s a solid job, his brother promised, one he could settle into for a while.
Read more

Shelly Leachman, The Current
KITP Newsletter, Spring 2019

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, new technologies were allowing biologists to generate massive amounts of data, but such data could be messy, and taking advantage of it demanded new quantitative tools.
Read more

Maggie Sherriffs, KITP Special Programs & Evaluation Manager
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

Viewing science at KITP through a different lens
Read more

Gary Smaby
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

We were very excited this month to see the return of Ulysses, the unique sculpture designed and built by KITP's Artist-in-Residence Jean-Pierre Hebert. 
Read more

Lars Bildsten, KITP Director
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

A Testimonial from the KITP Teacher’s Conference
Read more

Bruce Boehne, Middle School Math / Science / STEM Teacher at Zion Lutheran School, Dallas, Texas
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

In December 2018, we held a one-day symposium to celebrate the life and career of late KITP Permanent Member Joe Polchinski.
Read more

Robert Leigh, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign,
and Eva M. Silverstein, Stanford
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

Message from KITP Director, Lars Bildsten regarding Coronavirus

Physics graduate student Jared Goldberg has published a study with Lars Bildsten, director of the campus’s KITP and Gluck Professor of Physics, and KITP Senior Fellow Bill Paxton detailing how a star’s pulsation will affect the ensuing explosion when it does reach the end. (Read more on The Current...)

The 2014 Wave-Flows program at the KITP was the ideal place to formulate Dedalus, an open-source computational framework that solves intricate classes of  problems accurately and efficiently. Potential applications for Dedalus include fluid, chemical, radiation and biological transport problems in stars, planets, and laboratories.
Read more

Megan Turley, KITP Development Coordinator
KITP Newsletter, Fall 2019

Professor Cumrun Vafa presents "The String Landscape, the Swampland, and Our Universe" — learn more and RSVP at the event page.

(View Flyer)

The Fall 2019 KITP Newsletter is now available!
(Read More)

During her time as an organizer of the Intertwined Order and Fluctuations in Quantum Materials program in 2017, Cornell Professor of Physics Eun-Ah Kim initiated a series of regular lunches for women at KITP. Kim saw the lunches as an opportunity to cultivate a community of female theorists that was not available at their home institutions, and jumped at the chance to provide such a resource.

“KITP is a selective place,” She explains her reasoning behind the lunches, “Hence people who make it to KITP have a real shot at climbing the ladder and improving the stubbornly-stuck gender ratio at the senior level. Young female researchers coming to KITP often do not have senior women theorists who can be their mentor at their home institutions. Only at KITP will they have a chance to meet these senior women theorists.”

The lunches in the second-floor Tower Room at Kohn Hall provide encouragement to younger theorists who learn that their struggles, ranging from imposter syndrome and the two-body problem to insensitive comments from colleagues, are shared by others. For more senior theorists, it is an opportunity to encourage each other as they navigate the next steps in their careers.

The lunches continue to be popular among arriving program participants, 20% of whom are women. Although they formed out of a desire for female theorists to build a community, the meetings do not exclude anyone from participating. With the help of Program Manager David Kaczorowski and Deputy Director Mark Bowick, KITP formally facilitates the gatherings, which are now known simply as “Tower Room Lunches.”

“We provide the resources,” Kaczorowski explains, “But the participants decide what it becomes.”