The Department of Physics and Astronomy doctoral program at Washington State University is designed to produce leaders in industry, in academia, and at national laboratories. The department's progressive environment seeks to provide an atmosphere that fosters intellectual growth and quantitative reasoning. The program engages students in teaching and research activities that provide the skills, knowledge, and ability for critical thinking that will enable them to be productive members of society. In the process, our goal is to lay the foundations for technological advances that improve our quality of life. Research in the astronomy and astrophysics program usually falls into topics related to gravitational physics, sources for gravitational waves, stars, galaxies, galaxy formation and chemical enrichment, and cosmology. Students in the astrophysics program are involved in at least one research project that tackles a problem at the current edge of human understanding.<br><br>View weird quantum effects in the Bose-Einstein Condenstate laboratory. Investigate the theory of cold quantum gases, many-body physics, chaos, and complexity. Here, the ''normal'' rules do not apply.<br><br>Dr. Yogendra Gupta is the Director of the Institute for Shock Physics, a multidisciplinary research organization with an emphasis on shock wave and high pressure research on materials. State-of-the-art computational and experimental facilities are used to investigate phenomena over a significant range of length and time scales. Dr. Phil Marston performs research in physical acousitcs and optics. One topic is the radiation pressure of high-amplitude sound and its applications to bubble and droplet dynamics and to the dynamics of of fluids in low gravity. The image at right was taken 9 April, 2003, by cosmonaut Nikolas Budarin aboard the ISS in near-zero gravity conditions. It shows an air bubble inside a water droplet on a plant in the ''space garden.''