The Eighth Annual Undergraduate Physics Research Symposium was held on November 9, 2018 in the Rotunda in the West Oval Room from 1-4. Four undergraduates gave oral presentations of their physics and astronomy-related research at the event, and 4 undergraduates presented posters. Topics presented are as follows:

Posters

• Margaret Doyle: An Investigation into 400 nm Driven High-Order Harmonics
• Cole Miles: Reactive Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Structural Transitions in Transition Metal Dichalcogenides
• Nicholas Anderson: Pulsar-Timing for Undergraduates: Research Meets Outreach
• Andrew Jiao: Magnetohydrodynamic Approximations of the m=0 Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in a Z-Pinch

Oral Presentations

• Eric Rohr: Analyzing the Galaxy Size-Halo Size Relation at z=2 in FIREbox
• Brian Seymour: Testing General Relativity with Black Hole-Pulsars
• Chris Li: Emergent Gravity from Matter Fields: On the Fundamentality of Relativity
• Pedrom Zadeh: Gutzwiller Treatment of Strongly Correlated Systems

Abstracts for all presentations can be found here. Prizes were given to the best two presentations and posters. We would like to congratulate the following students for their outstanding performance:

Talks:

• 1st place: Pedrom Zadeh
• 2nd place: Brian Seymour

Posters:

• 1st place: Margaret Doyle
• 2nd place: Cole Miles

We would like to give special thanks to our judges: Profs. Zheng, Pfister, Braatz, and Friesen. We also would like to thank the Physics and Astronomy Departments for support for prizes.