Each year the College of Arts and Sciences honors faculty members who’ve excelled in teaching, advising, outreach, research and creative activity, and other aspects of the college’s mission. The Department of Physics and Astronomy was well-represented at the annual awards ceremony on March 31, when Assistant Professor Tova Holmes and Bains Professor Steve Johnston were recognized as outstanding researchers.

Understanding Matter’s Foundations

Holmes works in elementary particle physics and is deeply involved with research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She started at the ATLAS Experiment and is now part of the CMS Experiment, which sorts through the results of the LHC’s powerful particle collisions to search for new particles (and new physics) using the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector. She’s also turned her attention to the promise of a muon collider to further test the limits of what we understand about the particles and forces that make up all matter. Since joining the physics faculty in 2020, Holmes has won significant support and recognition for her work. In 2022 she was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award. In 2024 she won the university’s first-ever Cottrell Award and earlier this year she was named a Sloan Research Fellow. The college presented her with an Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award (Early Career.)

Decoding Quantum Materials

While Holmes focuses on particles, Bains Professor Steve Johnston wants to understand how and why quantum materials behave the way they do. As a condensed matter theorist, he applies mathematical models to demystify the complex interactions in quantum systems—those that defy the rules of classical physics models and have the potential to revolutionize science and technology (e.g., superconductivity). Johnston joined the faculty in 2014. Since then he has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2019), a UT Chancellor’s Citation Award for Extraordinary Professional Promise (2020), seen his research featured on the cover of Nature Physics, and played a key role in the university’s successful bid to win NSF funding for the Center for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (CAMM). Last year the department named him the Elizabeth M. Bains and James A. Bains Professor of Physics and Astronomy, support that enables him to develop and share a collection of codes (called SmoQy) to describe new quantum materials without having to start from scratch. He was honored with the college’s Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award (Mid-Career.)

While Holmes and Johnston have both won campus and national honors, the department’s students are equally impressed with their work, having selected Holmes as the Society of Physics Students Research Advisor of the Year and Johnston as the Graduate Physics Society Graduate Teacher of the Year (both in 2023).

In the past 10 years, physics faculty members have won 11 college research and creative achievement awards. Learn more about all the 2025 convocation awardees from the College of Arts and Sciences newsroom.