NIU Today

Northern Illinois University physics professor Omar Chmaissem, an NIU alumnae and a current postdoctoral student are key members of a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory shedding light this week on the mysteries of superconductivity. In a study published today in “Nature Communications,” the team announces the discovery of...

Do you have a great scientific research concept in mind but lack the high-powered tech facilities to get it done? If so, here’s a workshop for you. Northern Illinois University will host a one-day Argonne User Facility Awareness and Utilization Workshop from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in the Lincoln Room of...

Proton Computed Tomography. STEM education. Aerospace job creation. NIU’s significant accomplishments in advancing the creation and application of knowledge will move into the spotlight today in Washington, D.C., where federal lawmakers and their representatives will participate in the university’s first Research Roundtable. Led by President Doug Baker, Board of Trustees Chair John Butler and immediate...

Accompanied by their teachers, a dozen high school students visited DeKalb this week to participate in the 2013 QuarkNet Summer Institute hosted by the NIU Department of Physics. QuarkNet, founded in 1995, is a professional teacher development program funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Its goal is to involve...

John Lewis, senior research scholar at NIU’s Regional Development Institute, moderated a panel of experts in the fiber optics industry May 30 at the DeKalb County Economic Development Corp. Broadband and Economic Development Technology Focus Luncheon. About 150 attendees learned about the importance of high-speed fiber and broadband to economic development in the region. Matthew...

Imagine 100 million divers jumping into the ocean at once. Your task: Using high speed cameras, photograph the wake of each splash, then determine and plot exactly where each diver entered the water. That’s somewhat analogous to what a group of NIU physicists were trying to accomplish earlier this year using a technique known as...

Adam Kinzinger was first sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2011. He serves as the representative for the 16th Congressional District of Illinois and was appointed to the Energy & Commerce Committee as well as the Foreign Affairs Committee. Before he was sworn into office, Kinzinger was named to the House Majority Transition...

Affordability and convenient location were not the primary reasons that freshman physics major Gabriela Arriaga chose NIU. It was the opportunity to be involved in research as a freshman through NIU’s Research Rookies program that provided the deciding factor. “The best part about being involved with Research Rookies is being able to get hands-on experience...

Northern Illinois University particle physicists and thousands of their colleagues across the world are looking forward to fireworks of a different sort on the Fourth of July. Just yesterday, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia announced that scientists there – after more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the laboratory’s Tevatron...

NIU scientists have acquired a new high-performance computer cluster that will exponentially ramp up on-campus capabilities to sort and analyze large quantities of research data. The hybrid GPU/CPU supercomputer has a capacity of more than 30 teraflops, meaning it can do more than 30 trillion calculations per second. It is expected to usher in a...

NIU professor Tao Xu, who has developed a promising nanoscience research program in solar energy conversion, is now getting a big boost from the National Science Foundation. NSF awarded the chemistry and biochemistry professor with a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant of $400,000 to support his research and teaching efforts. CAREER awards support...

NIU’s School of Music will host a concert of music by Sever Tipei at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, in the Music Building Recital Hall. The concert is free and open to the public, and the recital hall is accessible to all. Born in 1943 in Bucharest, Romania, Tipei immigrated to the United States in...