CSU Physics Reunion at the 2026 American Physical Society Global Summit

The annual tradition of the reunion of the CSU Physics students, faculty, and alumni at the American Physical Society (APS) March Meetings continued in Denver, CO in March 2026, during the APS Global Summit*. This year CSU physics has been represented by one CSU REU student, one graduate student, four CSU physics alumni, and two CSU physics faculty who gave in total four contributed talks, three posters and one invited talk.

Soft Matter at CSU REU student Abby Horovka (senior at College of Wooster) presented her REU project with Drs. Hore and Streletzky “SI-RAFT Synthesis of Poly(methylacry late) - Grafted Gold Nanorods”. CSU MS Physics student Narayana Bommidi presented a poster on his graduate research project completed with Dr. Fodor “Chaotic Electrical Circuits as Analogs of Mechanical Pendulums”. Dr. Bickel presented a talk “Comparing and contrasting students' and faculty perceptions and utilization of GenAI”. Dr. Streletzky presented a poster on the work of his undergraduate and REU students “A Study of Bare and Grafted Gold Nanorods (AuNRs) with DDLS at Two Different Wavelengths”.

Three CSU physics alumni gave contributed talks on their research. Dr. Krista Freeman’ 12, newly minted assistant professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University, presented a talk “Structural determinants of bacteriophage antigenicity”. Dr. Phil Dee’13, a distinguished staff fellow at the Oak Ridge National Lab gave a talk “Neural operator-based self-learning hybrid Monte Carlo studies of electron-phonon coupled Hamiltonians”. Dr. Marie Blatnik’15, a postdoctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Lab, presented “Boosting Ultracold Neutron Production with Low Enriched Uranium”. Additionally, Jacob Adamczyk’ 20, PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, delivered an invited talk “Statistical Mechanics of Reinforcement Learning”.

The CSU grad student, CSU alumni, Dr. Bickel, and Dr. Streletzky met for a CSU Reunion dinner at which they shared a lot of fun CSU memories. In addition, CSU alumni together with Dr. Streletzky went to a few fun physics.

At the CSU reunion dinner (from left to right) Dr. Dee’13, Mr. Bommidi, Dr. Freeman’11, Dr. Bickel, Dr. Blatnik’15, Mr. Adamczyk’20, and Dr. Streletzky.	Drs. Freeman, Blatnik, and Streletzky at the Physics Sing-along