James McKee, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, works with the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) which has been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's 2025 Group Achievement Award for finding evidence of the gravitational wave background.

Sarina Kuersteiner, assistant professor of history has an article about commercial risk in the medieval Mediterranean forthcoming in Speculum, one of the field's most prestigious journals. The article, “Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154-1164 CE,” shows that the word rizq (Arabic for divine sustenance, provision, and livelihood) was used in similar contexts by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traders. Tracing one word across Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, and Latin documents, Kuersteiner argues that Mediterranean economic integration extended beyond the movement of goods to legal institutions. Kuersteiner was not entirely alone when researching the article. Union student, Ushna Khan '27, a computer science major who took her course on early Islamic history (HST 190), received an eight week summer research fellowship from the Templeton Institute and helped Sarina identify relevant documents and create a data frame.

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