Physics Department Welcomes Three New Faculty Members

We are excited to welcome three new faculty members this year!

Callum Jones, who received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Michigan, joins our department as Assistant Professor of Physics. His research combines the use of effective field theory and on-shell scattering amplitudes methods to address problems of physical significance in diverse areas of high-energy physics.  His work is relevant for the next generation of experiments and observation; from the high luminosity LHC to the anticipated third generation ground and space-based gravitational wave detectors.

Jingwei Liu, who received his PhD in 2024 from the University of Arizona, joins our department as Global Professor of Physics. He starts on the Tucson campus in Fall 2025 and will join our other two Global Professors (Ajith Rajapaksha and Fuguang Cao) in Spring 2026 to teach at our Hebei University of Technology (HEBUT) campus. Dr. Liu's area of research is theoretical cosmology, focusing on cosmological anomalies related to CMB observations. He develops and modifies inflationary models to study these anomalies and use high-precision CMB data to support or falsify various inflationary models.

Pooja Siwach, who received her PhD in 2021 from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, joins our department as Assistant Professor of Physics. She specializes in quantum information science, nuclear structure theory, and neutrino physics.  Her research leverages quantum algorithms and entanglement measures to model complex nuclear systems more accurately, advancing our understanding of nuclear processes under extreme conditions. Dr. Siwach holds a Bridge Position with the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Theory Alliance.