Lars Bildsten
Photo credit: Mia Nie
The banner image represents the outcomes from high energy interactions of nuclei. KITP Postdoc Bruno Scheihing-Hitschfeld recently received an outstanding dissertation award from the American Physical Society for his work in this area. You will find the full story here. This acknowledgement of his excellence is a reminder of how these early-career scientists continue to move the frontier of science forward.
I would like to thank all of you who so generously contributed to the Mitchel Postdoctoral Scholars Career Development Fund. This $2M endowment will provide resources for the research expenses of KITP Postdocs, enabling both their research and our ability to recruit them. Right now, we are reading the files of over 700 postdoc applicants, hoping to attract 4-6 new scientists to join us in fall 2026!
In fall 2025, six KITP Postdocs advanced to new positions in industry and academia. Utkarsh Agrawal started his own company, DigitalFence. Fridtjof Brauns left to become a Junior Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, and Alex Homrich is now a Burke Fellow at Caltech. Ali Lavasani took a science position at Quantinuum, while Chris Ni is now a Quantitative Researcher at Citadel Securities and Logan Prust is a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in Manhattan. Newly arrived postdocs in fall 2025 span most of physics. In high energy, we have Samuel Leutheusser from the Institute for Advanced Study, while in astrophysics we have Samuel Boos from U. Alabama, Ka Wai Ho from UW-Madison and Linhao Ma from Princeton. We also have two biophysicists: Yanin Guerra from the Dresden University of Technology and Henrik Weyer from Ludwig Maximilian University-Munich.
Our new project, KITP House, continues to progress! Aimed at enhancing collaborative science by providing housing for our postdoctoral scholars, graduate fellows and long-term sabbatical visitors, this facility will complete the needed physical infrastructure to ensure KITP’s lasting value to all of physics. Since our last Newsletter, we have submitted our project to the California Coastal Commission and proceeded with the design efforts, reaching a 50% construction document set in late November 2025. We aim to initiate construction in late winter 2026 and open in summer 2028.
KITP has been the long-term intellectual home of many remarkable scientists. Bill Paxton was one very close to me who passed away this summer. A collaborator and friend, Bill made a profound contribution to stellar astrophysics by creating the open-source tool Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). MESA is now constantly used by more than 1,000 astrophysicists around the world. On November 21, 2025, we brought together family, friends and the scientific community to celebrate Bill’s accomplishments in the symposium: “Celebration of Bill Paxton: Software for the Stars.” See the story here.
When our colleague Joe Polchinski passed in 2018, his spouse Dorothy Chun and I spent time together looking over his accumulated works in his office. I had never seen such a well-organized set of handwritten scientific notes. Dorothy generously agreed to donate these papers to the UCSB Archive, where they were cataloged and scanned over the last six years. This project is now complete, and here, you can read more about that endeavor. Joe had many talents, including being an intense bike rider. He would lead a ride from the front of Kohn Hall to the top of San Marcos pass quite often. This route became famous as “Joe’s Ride,” and we now have a topographic map mounted in the entry stair at Kohn Hall that shows the route. Please check it out next time you visit!
We very often speak to how interactions amongst KITP visitors lead to new scientific directions. Here, we have the story of a different outcome; the creation of a new textbook, Physics Bootcamp: Mathematical Methods for First-Year Physics and Engineering by James Dent and Joel Walker. Their article describes how their time at KITP led to the collaboration and the successful finish of this work that will enhance scientific education for generations. Of course, none of these interactions happen without the work of KITP’s amazing staff. Here, Demi Cain tells the story of Bibiana Rojas; Bibi to all of us! Bibi is the first person most of our visitors meet when they arrive in Kohn Hall. Return visitors are always eager to update her on all they’ve done since their last visit.
We continue to hear affirmation that KITP’s mission of bringing together scientists for prolonged periods of open dialog and collaboration has tremendous value. Thanks to all of you for both participating in, and supporting, all we do here at KITP!
~ Lars Bildsten, KITP Director