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Maitrayee Ghosh received the APS Distinguished Student Award from the American Physical Society Forum on International Physics and Forum for Early Career Scientists (FECS) at the APS Global Physics Summit 2026 in Denver, CO.

  PhD student Claudia Parisuaña defended her PhD thesis, "Hydrodynamics of warm dense matter enabled by X-ray free electron lasers" on March 12th, before her thesis committee of Prof. Mark Cappelli (Stanford), Prof. Ken Hara (Stanford), Prof. Patricia Burchat (Stanford), Dr. Arianna Gleason (SLAC) and Prof. Siegfried Glenzer (Stanford/SLAC).

In collaboration with the HEDS division, a Stanford team is exploring how new ultra-precise capsules could improve fusion reactors and other energy systems.  

The team developed a platform that uses powerful X-rays from the lab’s LCLS X-ray laser to resolve for the first time the evolution of instabilities in high-density plasmas. 

  PhD student Rebeca Toro defended her PhD thesis, "Transport Properties of Warm Dense Matter Probed by Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy" on February 4th, before her thesis committee of Prof. Mark Cappelli (Stanford), Prof. Debbie Senesky (Stanford), Prof. Mike Dunne (Stanford, Inertia), Prof. Ben Ofori-Okai (Stanford/SLAC) and Prof. Siegfried Glenzer (Stanford/SLAC).

When Daniella Fenster and her Global Sustainability Challenge teammates started looking for ideas for a project last year, they kept returning to news reports of people going without power for days or weeks after floods. Stories from Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, and across the United States inspired them to consider how they could improve people’s lives in the aftermath of a deluge.

Join us for a special talk with Helen Quinn - a pioneering particle physicist and former Stanford professor - as she shares her journey through physics and discovery. Helen Quinn reflects on her experience as a woman foraging a path in physics and learn how she helped reshape our understanding of the universe.

Researchers hoped to clarify the boundaries between different types of superionic water – the hot, black ice believed to exist at the core of giant ice planets. Instead, they found multiple atomic stacking patterns coexisting in overlapping configurations never seen before in this phase of water.

In its early lifetime, Earth likely went through cycles of compression and decompression, buckling and eventually rebounding under the violent young solar system’s bombardment of asteroids and comets. Though we would never want to go back to this epoch, Zhang et al. have recreated similar conditions in a laboratory to help study our home’s history.