Assistant Professor Paul Romatschke of the University of Colorado Boulder physics department will receive a five-year, $750,000 grant as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program created to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce with top young researchers.
Romatschke was among 68 winners selected nationwide from a pool of 850 applicants from universities and national laboratories
Romatschke is the eighth CU-Boulder faculty member to be selected for the 3-year-old program. Other schools with winners included Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.
“For CU-Boulder faculty to receive eight Early Career Research Program awards in three years is a remarkable achievement and a sign of the terrific young faculty available to our students,” said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “We congratulate Professor Romatschke on this high honor."
Romatschke’s proposal involves using a recent development in string theory to create a dynamic model for interactions that occur just after the collision of two heavy ion particles during experiments at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider. The results will help to eliminate many unknowns in current hydrodynamic models of experimental data from the RHIC and the LHC.
Romatschke also won a 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for $50,000 in February to pursue research in relativistic fluid dynamics and its application to high-energy nuclear physics. He was one of two CU-Boulder faculty to receive a Sloan Fellowship this year, along with Assistant Professor Robin Dowell of the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department and the BioFrontiers Institute.
“Assistant Professor Romatschke joins 17 other CU-Boulder physics faculty members who have won early career, young investigator and other junior faculty awards since 2000,” said physics department Chair Paul Beale. “These outstanding young faculty members are quickly becoming international leaders in their research fields.”
The seven previous DOE Early Career Research Program awardees at CU-Boulder were Alireza Doostan of the aerospace engineering sciences department; Alexis Templeton of the geological sciences department; Arthi Jayaraman of the department of chemical and biological engineering; and Minhyea Lee, Michael Hermele, Alysia Marino and Tobin Munsat of the department of physics.
For a complete list of this year’s DOE awardees go to http://science.energy.gov/early-career.
Contact:
Peter Caughey, CU-Boulder media relations, 303-492-4007
caughey@colorado.edu
Paul Romatschke
