Welcome to the Department of Physics

 Welcome to the Department of Physics

The University of Connecticut is located in a rural setting in scenic New England. The main campus is located in Storrs, approximately midway between New York City and Boston. The University's first Physical Review article was published in 1899, the first physics course was taught in 1918. The Department of Physics granted its first PhD in 1954. One (so far) of the Department's M.S. graduates went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Presently the Department has a vibrant research program, with 29 full-time faculty, as well as a with joint faculty in affiliated departments and organizations, such as Brookhaven National Lab (BNL), Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (ITAMP) at Harvard, UConn's own Health Center and Institute of Materials Science. Currently we have 6 postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty, 90 graduate students and 80 physics and engineering physics undergraduates.

Our distinguished faculty includes seven Fellows of the American Physical Society,  two Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and one Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London). Over the past decade junior faculty have won three National Science Foundation's (NSF) CAREER awards, one NSF Young Investigator award, and one DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator award. In terms of statistical measures, our research productivity is high: Storrs faculty published 808 refereed papers from 1997 to 2007, with 1447 citations in 2007, and 10.66 citations per paper in the period 1997-2007 (data from the ISI Web of Knowledge).

The Department of Physics offers a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses, including four different introductory sequences for undergraduates. The graduate program provides research opportunities in numerous fields including atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics, nuclear and high energy physics, condensed matter physics, polymer physics, and geophysics.