The Department of Physics and Astronomy celebrate faculty research and their commitment to student success.

Silvia Bompadre was promoted to Teaching Professor. Bompadre also serves as the Associate Department Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies. 

Curators’ Distinguished Professor Shi-Jie Chen received a grant for $2,609,232 from the National Institutes of Health to study “New methods for computational modeling of RNA structures." Shi-Jie Chen’s lab was ranked #1 in the CASP competition for RNA structure prediction. He is also cited and quoted in a recent Nature article about the competition and the new focus on RNA structures. 

Assistant Professor Keith Cassidy is one of several Mizzou researchers studying the structure of a protein that could lead to more targeted heart disease treatments. Their work “A Protein at the heart of heart disease” was highlighted in Show Me Mizzou.

Researchers Zachary Berndsen and Keith Cassidy were recruited to Mizzou because of their knowledge of cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that uses electrons to determine the 3D structure of biological molecules. Their recent paper, “The structure of apolipoprotein B100 from human low-density lipoprotein” was published in Nature. Their article “The structure of bad cholesterol comes into focus” was also published in Nature. 

Suchi Guha's research group has been very active working in areas of neuromorphic organic devices and ultrafast optical spectroscopy. Guha was invited to speak at several international events, including the Nanoseries Conference, Valencia, Spain; Electronic Structure Theory and Experimental Realization, IIT Madras; and the International Materials Research Congress, Cancun.



 

Graduate student, Dallar Babaian, (co-advised by Professor Ping Yu), defended her PhD dissertation in August 2025 and joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoctoral scholar. 

Guha was awarded the 2025 Gold Chalk Award by the Graduate Professional Council for significant contribution to graduate education.

Randy Burns was awarded the 2024 Ron Boain and Catherine Rangel-Boain Dissertation Award. 

Arash Ghobadi presented his work on neuromorphic organic transistors at the 2025 spring meeting of the MRS (Materials Research Society). Arash, Dallar, Randy, and undergraduate students Evan Restuccia and Thomas Kallaos have authored/co-authored several publications.

Professors Suchi Guha's and Gavin King's collaborative research harnessing perovskites for energy innovation was featured on Show Me Mizzou.

King’s laboratory welcomed new graduate student Alankit Dey and several undergraduate researchers, including Kira Wilson and Oktavia Jaszczynska. 

The lab published several high-profile papers in publications including Nano Letters. In this NSF-funded work they employed their newly refurbished Ice Lithography instrument and developed a novel use of frozen ethanol vapor for electron beam lithography on biological material.  In particular, they demonstrated the fabrication of solid graphite-like material directly on biological membranes, portending future applications such as living solar cells. A patent disclosure has been filed to facilitate future commercialization of the technology.

Image source: D. Chiaro et al., Nano Letters 2025

The image shows the concept of using frozen ethanol (EtOH ice) as a sacrificial resist in an electron beam (e-beam) lithography process. The e-beam converts the frozen ethanol into a graphite-like material (ethanol based material, orange) that is solid at room temperature. The strategy enables precise 3D printing on delicate biological membranes. 

Assistant Professor Pontus Laurell serves on the executive committee of Mizzou’s Quantum Innovation Center (Mizzou-QIC) connecting faculty, students, and industry partners interested in quantum computing. Through its Internship program, the QIC funded several student projects over the summer, including the work of physics student Amarnath Chakraborty.

Professor Laurell was invited to speak at the SCES2025, Strongly Correlated Electron Systems, conference in Montreal, part of a special symposium session on Entanglement in SCES supported by a Faculty International Travel Award from the College of Arts and Science.

Assistant Professor Maria Mills was the recipient of a National Institutes of Health award funded at $350,000 annually for 5 years for her research on the coordination of complex dynamics by DNA topoisomerases and DNA repair processes. Mills’ lab group utilizes a combination of force, torque, and fluorescence to understand how proteins remodel DNA structure.

Deepak Singh was promoted to Professor.

Research on the important discovery of magnetism in NiSi conducted by Singh and graduate student Pousali Ghosh is featured on the Department of Energy – Basic Energy Sciences website.

Their research was also featured on Show Me Mizzou.

Singh (right) works with Mizzou graduate student Pousali Ghosh in Singh's lab

Assistant Professor Charles Steinhardt’s research that offers a new theory on star formation was featured in on Show-Me Mizzou.

Curators’ Distinguished Professor Carsten Ullrich received a Fulbright Specialist Program Award and is on the Fulbright Specialist roster until 2027. In October 2025, Ullrich taught a graduate course on Introduction to Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory and collaborated with scientists at the Condensed Matter Theory and Computational Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai.

Professor Haojing Yan and his team's research in extragalactic astronomy is leading to interesting (and unexpected) results. In particular, he and one of his graduate students, Bangzheng (Tom) Sun, published two significant papers utilizing data from the James Webb Space Telescope, including the early settlement of Milky Way-like spiral galaxies and discovery of candidate galaxies in the early universe that are unusually luminous. Their work on spiral and candidate galaxies was featured on Show Me Mizzou and received world-wide attention, landing in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. They have three additional papers under review.