Young Researcher Awarded Funds from European Union for International Research
NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Andrea Signori, a Jefferson Lab postdoc in the Theory Center was recently awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (MSCA) through the European Commission, the executive of the European Union. The MSCA allow researchers to conduct research across international boundaries. Signori’s proposal was one of 1348 selected for funding out of 9089 proposals submitted to the program, designed “to create a game-changing impact on our society and economy.”
Competition for these fellowships is quite fierce. Of all of the awards, only a dozen Global Fellowships, the type awarded to Signori, were awarded for physics. The Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Tibor Navracsics, stated "We are today recognising the potential of 1,348 excellent, internationally mobile researchers who faced intense international competition to be awarded with a fellowship. The projects they will work on will help tackle some of the biggest challenges our societies face, helping to build a resilient, fair, competitive Europe."
The work on Signori’s research project, SQuHadron- Strategies to Tackle the Quest for Hadronization, will be conducted between his future home institution, the University of Pavia, partnering with Jefferson Lab. He will spend 24 months at Jefferson Lab and 12 Months at Pavia.
“I’ll be investigating the phenomenon of hadronization, i.e., how quarks and gluons transform into pions, kaons and other hadrons,” says Signori. Quarks and gluons are confined inside protons and neutrons, which are the fundamental building blocks of all atomic nuclei that make up essentially all the visible matter in the universe, including the stars, the planets, and us. Quarks and gluons could be briefly liberated when protons and/or neutrons are struck by the 12 GeV electron beam, for scientists at Jefferson Lab to study their properties and interactions, but, they turn into hadrons before they reach a detector. “Understanding the hadronization is critically important for us to connect what happened between quarks and gluons to the hadrons observed in our detectors, and hadronization studies are crucial for the physics program of Jefferson Lab,” says Dr. Jianwei Qiu, Theory Center Director at Jefferson Lab. “I am glad to have the chance to continue my collaboration with the Jefferson Lab community,” says Signori, “and in particular with the exceptional group of people of the Theory Center.”
Professor Alessandro Bacchetta of the University of Pavia says “These fellowships are very prestigious, they are funded to allow investigators to learn and conduct research on an international scale and bring that knowledge and expertise back to the home institution.”
August 29, 2018
Contact: Deborah Dowd, Communications Office, dowd@jlab.org, 757-269-7180
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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, a joint venture of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. and PAE, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.