Two assistant professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University have been selected to receive funding for research as part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Program.
Vanderbilt’s Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli (pictured above, right) and Jean-François Paquet (pictured above, left) are among 93 scientists selected from across the nation from 48 universities and 12 national labs in 27 states to receive funding from the DOE’s research program.
These highly competitive early career awards from the U.S. Department of @ENERGY Office of Science reflect the exceptional talent of our distinguished Vanderbilt faculty and underscore the transformative power of their research in shaping our understanding of our cosmos. https://t.co/EmQJxNzjim
— VU Provost Office (@VU_Provost) August 9, 2023
Kunnawalkam Elayavalli’s and Paquet’s projects will use “complementary techniques to study the properties of quarks and gluons—the smaller constituents of protons and neutrons that form atomic nuclei,” according to Vanderbilt.
Quarks and gluons are fundamental building blocks of the observable universe, Kunnawalkam Elayavalli said, adding that “colliding them produces particles that can be observed with state-of-the-art particle detectors.”
“One of the biggest unsolved mysteries in nature is in quantifying the mechanism by which quarks and gluons metamorphosize into stable particles that make up what we see all around us,” Kunnawalkam Elayavalli stated. “The results of our project will enable us to extract the dynamics of quarks and gluons for the first time in high-energy nuclear physics.”
Both projects will receive $875,000 over five years from the DOE.
The funding will also allow the researchers to be among the earliest researchers to leverage data captured by the sPHENIX detector, a 1,000-ton 3D digital camera that began taking data this year, Vanderbilt notes.
“These highly competitive early career awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science reflect the exceptional talent of our distinguished Vanderbilt faculty and underscore the transformative power of their research in shaping our understanding of our cosmos,” C. Cybele Raver, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said in a statement. “I offer my heartiest congratulations to Drs. Kunnawalkam Elayavalli and Paquet and the VandyGRAF team.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli” by University of Vanderbilt. Photo “Jean-François Paquet” by University of Vanderbilt. Background Photo “University of Vanderbilt Campus” by Stablenode. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Professor – I am sure that there are SOME excellent profs at Vandy. However, the administration has turned Vandy into a disgraceful place.
Congratulations to both professors. I have to confess my first instinct in seeing Vanderbilt University and professor in the same headline immediately felt me a little ill at ease. There are excellent faculty at Vanderbilt, unfortunately there are a handful that are subpar that seem to draw most of main stream media coverage.. Those few subpar faculty sully the reputation of the University as well as those like these two who were awarded research funding.