Graduate Physics Studies at NMSU

The Department of Physics at New Mexico State University (NMSU) offers both Ph.D. and master’s degrees. There are about 40 graduate students in our Department, mostly working on their Ph.D. degrees and receiving financial aid in the form of Graduate Assistantships (Teaching Assistantships and Research Assistantships). Each year, the Department makes offers to approximately 20 applicants, and about 10 students accept our offers and come. All of our graduate students found jobs in university research groups and in government and industrial research laboratories after obtaining their Ph.D. or master’s degrees.

Students may choose areas of specialization from a variety of experimental and theoretical/computational research programs in the Department. The current major research areas of the Department include condensed matter physics/materials science, geophysics, optics, particle and nuclear physics, physics education, and others. These research projects are supported by multimillion-dollar funding by various federal agencies and two national laboratories within the New Mexico State: Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. In addition to the in-house research, the Department conducts collaborative research programs with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory, Fermilab, DESY (Germany), and local laboratories.