Physics Department Community

The Department includes approximately 60 faculty members who teach and mentor about 140 graduate students. About 48 Department staff members provide essential support to teaching, research, and advising. The Department holds a number of social gatherings, including a daily cookie/coffee hour, weekly colloquia, potluck gatherings, and Halloween and Holiday parties. Each fall, the Chair delivers a "State of the Department" address, and at the end of the winter semester, an awards ceremony is held at which undergraduate and graduate students are presented awards.

The Department offers a large variety of general and field-specific seminars, some of which are ideally suited to expand the scientific background of graduate students. First year students attend Mini-Colloquium (Physics 501), which is a series of short lectures conducted by Physics faculty about their fields of research. The U-M Physics Department is especially proud of its Saturday Morning Physics lectures. Each talk is illustrated with multimedia technology and live demonstrations. These public presentations, meant for the passionately curious, are informative and entertaining and attract more than 300 University and community members. Important to the vitality of the Department are the weekly Departmental Colloquia, where nationally and internationally renowned scientists present lectures for a scientifically literate audience. The colloquia are ideal for graduate students to learn about exciting developments in the broad area of physics. Two annual lectures-- The Ford Motor Company Distinguished Lecture in Physics and The Ta-You Wu Lecture-- have become an integral part of the tradition of the Department and are very popular among faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. The speakers invited to present these lectures are world-renowned scientists. Recent Nobel Laureates who have spoken to the Department include, Steven Chu, Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, William Phillips, Horst Stormer, and the Department's own Martinus Veltman. Graduate students will benefit from attending weekly field-specific seminars or research group meetings (e.g. Condensed Matter/Atomic Molecular Optical, High Energy Astrophysics, High Energy Particle Theory, High Energy Theory, Spin Physics).

Why Pursue a Ph.D. at U-M?

Michigan Ph.D. graduates obtain Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at the world's top universities and laboratories. They also make significant contributions to industry and the medical field. Below are just a few examples of where our former graduate students are now:

Los Alamos National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Fermilab National Laboratory
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Harvard University
Princeton University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Duke University
Ohio State University
John Hopkins
California Institute of Technology
University of Michigan Hospital
National Institutes of Health
Ford Motor Company
Motorola
Lockheed-Martin
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies