Cindy Regal, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of physics and associate fellow of JILA, has been awarded a prestigious David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation established the fellowship "to allow the nation's most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements." This year, 16 fellows were selected from 100 applicants at 50 leading universities.
The five-year, $875,000 fellowship will fund Regal's work in experimental atomic physics. She is interested in developing techniques to control single neutral atoms with lasers and create small quantum gases that can be manipulated at the single-atom level, for applications in quantum information science and in modeling physics of complex materials.
"I am delighted to receive this award and am very grateful to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation," Regal said. "My research group looks forward to having flexible resources to attack a challenging problem."
Regal joins CU-Boulder physics professors Michael Hermele, Shijie Zhong, Leo Radzihovsky and John Price who were awarded Packard Fellowships in previous years.
Only Princeton University leads CU-Boulder in the number of physics faculty members who have been awarded Packard Fellowships.
Other Packard Fellows at CU-Boulder are Barbara Demmig-Adams and Pieter Johnson in ecology and evolutionary biology, Alexis Templeton in geological sciences, Kristi Anseth in chemical and biological engineering, David Jonas in chemistry and biochemistry and Elizabeth Bradley in computer science.
Regal also is the first CU-Boulder professor to earn the highly regarded Clare Boothe Luce Professorship Award. The award is designed to "encourage women to enter, study, graduate and teach in science, mathematics and engineering."
For more information about the Packard Foundation and the 2011 fellowship awards go to www.packard.org.
Cindy Regal
