Aurora Ireland and Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, graduate students in the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago, were awarded the prestigious Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research fellowship. Ms. Ireland’s work is on new directions in electroweak symmetry breaking, and Mr. Villalpando works on dark matter in cosmological context: investigating dark matter with skipper CCDs and stellar streams. Both students are currently affiliated with Fermilab.
The following is excerpted from the DOE announcement:
“Awardees were selected from a diverse pool of graduate applicants from institutions around the country. Selection was based on merit peer review by external scientific experts. Since 2014, the SCGSR program has provided more than 700 U.S. graduate awardees from 150 universities with supplemental funds to conduct part of their thesis research at a host DOE laboratory in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist. In this cohort of awardees, 3 are the first SCGSR awardee to come from their institution, and more than 19% attend minority serving institutions (MSIs).
SCGSR awardees work on research projects of significant importance to the Office of Science (SC) mission and that address societal challenges at national and international scale. Projects in this cohort span the six SC programs and cover topics like fundamental studies for energy sciences, earth systems modeling, environmental system science, advanced accelerator and detector research, nuclear physics, enabling R&D for fusion energy, microelectronics, machine learning, quantum information science, and data science.”
Read the full announcement and view the list of awardees via the DOE.