Jared Reiten, a graduate student in the department of Physics & Astronomy, has recently been awarded a prestigious fellowship from the University
of California Office of the President: the UC-National Lab In-Residence Graduate Fellowship. Three UC graduate students were selected from a highly
competitive pool of applicants to receive this fellowship. Each Fellow will be awarded a $60,000 annual stipend, as well as $2,600 in annual travel
support for a total of two years. They will also have the unique opportunity to conduct research and receive training at a national laboratory.
In Jared’s case, he will be working at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Jared currently works with Prof. Zhongbo Kang, researching Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and High Energy Nuclear Theory. His winning proposal, titled “Exploring the new state of matter of the early universe,” explores the very first moments of our universe’s history. Just a few microseconds after the Big Bang, the entire universe was permeated with an astonishingly hot, dense soup consisting of fundamental particles – quarks and gluons – which interact through the strong force that binds together the smallest pieces of atoms.
Using powerful accelerators, this soup, called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), can be recreated by clashing two opposing beams of massive ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. Jared’s proposal presented his goal of developing a theoretical framework to probe the QGP through heavy flavor jets.
More details on the fellowship can be found on the UCOP website.