News/Events

Five West Virginia University students have joined an elite group of researchers who’ve been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Three outstanding faculty members at West Virginia University have been selected as the 2023-24 Benedum Distinguished Scholars in recognition of their exceptional research and scholarly activity.

Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named three exemplary Cottrell Scholars as recipients of its 2024 STAR and IMPACT Awards. CS 1997 Mark Moldwin, Physics, University of Michigan, has won the STAR award, and CS 2009 Maura McLaughlin, Physics, West Virginia University, and CS 2009 Rory Waterman, Chemistry, University of Vermont, have won IMPACT awards.

The Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology at West Virginia University is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Sean McWilliams as its newest Director. McWilliams was appointed to this new role by the former Director, Dr. Maura McLaughlin, who now serves as the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at WVU.

For  Duncan Lorimer and  Maura McLaughlin, working at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico set off a sequence of life events that would include marriage, children, finding a home at  West Virginia University, an out-of-this-world scientific discovery and, now, earning a highly prestigious award described as the “Nobel Prize of the East.”

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – More than two dozen researchers with ties to West Virginia University have helped unearth evidence of ripples in space time that have never been observed before.

West Virginia students learn how to map the Galaxy to better understand our Universe.

Honored for their innovative work in the field of fast radio bursts utilizing the CHIME radio telescope, the international CHIME/FRB team will receive the 2022 Berkeley prize for its dramatic progress on fast radio bursts (FRBs).  

An international team of astronomers, including members of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), has announced the results of a comprehensive search for ripples in the fabric of space-time – known as gravitational waves. The team searched for low-frequency gravitational waves, which can originate from supermassive black hole binaries residing in galaxies or from events occurring soon after the formation of the universe in the Big Bang. Detecting these low-frequency signals will open a brand-new window in the gravitational wave spectrum and help scientists enhance their understanding of the evolution of galaxies, their central black holes, and the early universe.