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UMass Amherst physics professors Andrea Pocar, Dave Kawall and Tony Dinsmore have been appointed 2024 Fellows of the American Physical Society, an honor that recognizes excellence in physics and exceptional service to the physics community.

Pocar and Kawall were both recognized through the Division of Nuclear Physics, and Dinsmore through the Division of Soft Matter Physics. They join 10 other current UMass physics faculty members who have been selected APS Fellows, as well as several emeritus faculty members. It is an exceptional honor for any single department to have three members appointed to APS Fellowships in the same year, the physics department notes. 

Dinsmore, who serves as the physics department head, is an experimental physicist who works on colloidal materials. Dinsmore’s fellowship award citation reads, “For advancing understanding of colloidal assembly in bulk fluids and on fluid interfaces, through the measurement of structure and interactions driven by entropy, geometry, and interfacial tension.”

Pocar is an experimentalist who works on neutrino physics in a variety of underground experiments. Pocar’s fellowship award citation reads, “For critical contributions to detector development and physics analysis of the first 100-kg class double-beta decay experiment, and for technical innovations that led to improved performance of low background detectors dedicated to neutrino physics and the search for dark matter.”

Kawall works on sensitive tests of the magnetic dipole of the muon as well as on other tests of the fundamental models of elementary particles. Kawall’s fellowship award citation reads, “For contributions to precision muon physics and fundamental symmetries measurements that test and challenge the Standard Model, and for contributions to revealing the spin structure of nucleons.”

More information about the fellowship can be found on the APS website.