Three Researchers Affiliated with Jefferson Lab Receive DOE Early Career Awards

Young scientists win grants to support research for building better accelerators and for using Jefferson Lab’s recently upgraded accelerator and supercomputers to suss out new information about subatomic particles.

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Three young scientists affiliated with the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have been awarded research grants as part of the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program.

Anne-Marie Valente-Feliciano, Anselm Vossen and Raul Briceño are among 84 scientists nationwide awarded the five-year grants to pursue their research. The effort, now in its ninth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

The grants are geared toward researchers who have received a Ph.D. within the past 10 years, and who are pursuing a research topic that falls within one of the Department's Office of Science's six major program offices.

The three Jefferson Lab scientists were awarded grants through the Office of Nuclear Physics, and they will conduct research in the following areas:

The Quest for Better Accelerators

Anne-Marie Valente-Feliciano is hunting for the formula to produce better particle accelerators for research, industry and medicine.

The ability to perfectly control the process of laying thin films of material onto the surface of an inexpensive metal may be all it takes to produce more efficient and cheaper particle accelerators for a wide range of applications. Valente-Feliciano, an accelerator physicist at Jefferson Lab, has been awarded a DOE Early Career Award to pursue her research into building better accelerators.

As a researcher based at Jefferson Lab, a DOE national laboratory, Valente-Feliciano will receive a grant for at least $500,000 per year for her project, titled “Next Generation Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) Cavities with Optimized RF Performance via Energetic Condensation Thin Film Technology.” The five-year research grant will cover salary and research expenses.

Read more about Valente-Feliciano’s research here.

Gaining New Insights into Proton Structure

Anselm Vossen will take advantage of Jefferson Lab’s recently upgraded CEBAF Accelerator to learn more about the particles that build our universe.

Vossen, a Jefferson Lab jointly appointed assistant professor at Duke University, has been awarded a DOE Early Career Award to develop experimental and analysis techniques that make full use of the new generation of high-precision experiments made possible by the upgrade of Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.

As a university-based researcher, Vossen will receive a grant for at least $150,000 per year for the next five years for his project, titled “Novel Experimental Probes of Quantum Chromodynamics in Semi-Inclusive Deep-Inelastic Scattering and e+e- Annihilation.” Funds are used to cover salary and research expenses.

Read more about Vossen's research here.

Revealing the Details of Subatomic Particle Interactions

Raul Briceño will engage the incredible computational power of supercomputers to unravel the secrets of subatomic particles and how they interact.

Raul Briceño, a Jefferson Lab jointly appointed assistant professor at Old Dominion University, has been awarded a DOE Early Career Award to develop and implement a universal framework to study systems of particles built of more than one hadron (hadrons are subatomic particles and include protons and neutrons, for instance). He also plans to study how the particles that make up hadrons, called quarks and gluons, arrange themselves inside hadrons.

As a university-based researcher, Briceño will receive a grant for at least $150,000 per year for the next five years for his project, titled “Multi-hadron systems via Lattice QCD.” Funds are used to cover salary and research expenses.

Read more about Briceño's research here.

Contact: Kandice Carter, Jefferson Lab Communications Office, 757-269-7263, kcarter@jlab.org

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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. JSA is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. (SURA).

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 https://energy.gov/science