Honors Day 2025

May 8, 2025

The Department of Physics and Astronomy gathered on May 5 for our annual Honors Day celebration to mark another year of amazing achievements. Staff, students, and faculty were recognized for their outstanding service, academic accomplishments, and research contributions.

Undergraduate Awards

The undergraduate awards recognize both beginning and senior students for their accomplishments in academics, research, and leadership. For 2025 there were 10 exceptional nominees for these honors: Jordan Ashley, Olivia Clark, Daniel Dumont, Isabelle Garrett, Lindsey Hessler, Adam Krcal, Kinsley Lane, Isaac Noe, Jack Peltier, and Nathan Whittington.

The Outstanding First Year Physics Student Awards recognize extraordinary achievement by students in the first year of physics study. This year there were four honorees: Olivia Clark, Isabelle Garrett, Kinsley Lane and Nathan Whittington.

The Talley Awards are named for the late Robert Talley, who was a physics department distinguished alumnus and whose generosity made these honors possible.

The Talley Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research went to Jack Peltier, who works in Professor Robert Grzywacz’s nuclear physics group. He started out providing technical support like 3D printing and CAD design, with his responsibilities growing to include data analysis and detector construction. He is the first author on a Physics Letters B paper under review.

The Talley Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Leadership went to Lindsey Hessler. A double major in physics and business, she is part of the medium energy physics research group and took an active role in helping set up Assistant Professor Dien Nguyen’s 3He polarization lab. She has also designed presentations on professionalism and secured funding for a Women in Physics Mentorship Matrix to build camaraderie and offer career advice and mentoring to students and faculty.

The James W. McConnell Award for Academic Excellence recognizes students who have excelled in the classroom. This year’s awardee, Daniel Dumont, is a double major in physics along with biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology. He has a stellar transcript and has also excelled in the lab and in data analysis.

The most prestigious of our undergraduate awards is the Douglas V. Roseberry Distinguished Upper Classman Major Award, supported by the generosity of the Roseberry Family. This honor recognizes an upper level student who has excelled in academics, research, leadership, and building a departmental community. This year’s honoree is Jordan Ashley, who came to the department as a transfer student and has excelled both at particle physics research and revitalizing UT’s chapter of the Society of Physics Students. She has organized workshops, social events, conference travel, public outreach, and fundraising efforts. As SPS president, she has worked hard to make sure the chapter serves the physics student community.

Service Awards

Physics students make meaningful and thoughtful contributions to the department’s classrooms and teaching laboratories. This year 11 students were nominated for the service awards that acknowledge their investment of time and talent: Dessie Durham, Daniel DeSena, Ryan Elder, Josiah Elliott, Joseph Hewa, Ahmed Ismail, Ben Johnson, Brodie Kane, Marianna Pezzella, Caroline Riggall, and Adam Vendrasco.

For those efforts over the past academic year the department presented three Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards. The honors went to:

Ahmed Ismail: For extraordinary service as a GTA for graduate-level quantum mechanics.

Brodie Kane: For outstanding performance as a GTA in the studio labs for pre-health majors.

Caroline Riggall: For outstanding performance as a GTA in astronomy labs.

Graduate Awards

Graduate students are crucial to the department’s success in research, teaching, mentoring, and leadership. This year nine students were nominated for graduate awards: Chathuddasie Amarasinghe, Nora Bauer, Jordan O’Kronley, Louis Primeau, Caroline Riggall, Aya Rutherford, Brandi Skipworth, Jinu Thomas, and Colby Thompson.

The Stelson Fellowships are named for the late Paul Stelson, who had a prestigious career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and served as an adjunct professor in the physics department. The Stelson Family established these honors to support outstanding graduate students, especially in their research endeavors.

The Stelson Fellowship for Beginning Research went to Louis Primeau. Working with Assistant Professor Yang Zhang, his focus is on topological transition, and quantum transport in two dimensional semiconductors for the precise measurements of quantum wavefunctions and potential applications. He has published papers in PRL and Progress in Quantum Electronics and has another accepted in Nature Electronics.

Jinu Thomas won the Stelson Fellowship for Professional Promise. As part of Bains Professor Steve Johnston’s group, he is working on an inelastic photon scattering technique that has become an essential probe of correlated materials. He has published in high-profile journals like npj Quantum Materials and Physical Review X. Last year he won a competitive US Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research fellowship.

The Fowler-Marion Award recognizes a graduate student who has made exceptional contributions to the department in scholarship, research, and departmental citizenship. This year’s honoree is Brandi Skipworth. She has been an outstanding GTA and plays a crucial role in a track-finder project for the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider, mastering the intricacies of track finding and statistical methods in her work with Assistant Professor Tova Holmes. She also mentors new graduate students, hosts social events for her fellow students, and serves on panels to best represent the department.

Faculty Awards

Each year the Society of Physics Students and the Graduate Physics Society choose an outstanding teacher and research advisor to recognize at Honors Day. This year’s awardees were: