Daphne Chang Memorial Award Fund

Daphne Chang Memorial Award Fund

In Memoriam - Daphne Y. Chang (Trinity 2005), a Duke Physics major, passed away on December 21st after battling a never fully diagnosed disease on and off for the past two years. She was 26 years old. Daphne will be remembered by the Duke Physics community as an extraordinary person: in her sophomore year she joined the Nuclear Theory Group as an independent study student. Her subsequent research under the supervision of Prof. Steffen A. Bass on the production of strange quarks in relativistic heavy-ion collisions led to her giving talks and showing posters at several national and international conferences as well as publishing her results as a letter in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. Daphne defended her Honor's Thesis at the end of her junior year and subsequently went on to work as a TA for the introductory quantum mechanics course and as  an administrative assistant at TUNL until her graduation (a semester early). Daphne was accepted into the many top physics graduate programs in the country, including MIT, Columbia, Yale, Stanford and Caltech. She went to Caltech pursuing a Ph.D. in the Space Astrophysics Lab under Prof. Chris Martin. Daphne was not only a brilliant young physicist, but also a very warm and compassionate person with a broad range of interests outside of physics who brought a lot of lighthearted fun to the departmental social scenes. In order to honor Daphne's memory, the Department of Physics is creating the "Daphne Chang Memorial Award for Undergraduate Research," which will be  given to the best undergraduate research thesis of a given year. For more information on the Memorial Award, and how to contribute to the endowment which will fund the award, please click here. Contributed by Prof. Steffen A. Bass and Prof. Haiyan Gao