Justin Cammarota has just received a grant toward continuing his research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. He is among 80 graduate students representing 27 states selected to receive support through the DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2021 Solicitation 2 cycle.
Cammarota is pursuing a Ph.D. in William & Mary’s Department of Physics. He will work with Jefferson Lab’s Wally Melnitchouk and other Theory Center staff on a research project that will contribute to answering questions about how the proton emerges from its underlying quark and gluon constituents. Cammarota’s advisor at William & Mary is Jianwei Qiu, the Governor’s Distinguished CEBAF Professor, who also is JLab’s Theory Center director.
The project will translate Cammarota’s theoretical structure function developments, which combine QED and QCD factorization formalism, into a computational package ready for use by experimentalists as they analyze new scattering data. Structure functions relate to the probability distribution of quarks in the proton, and are of fundamental importance necessary to understand the experimental connection to theory.
SCGSR enables world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories. The program helps prepare graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures the U.S. position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.
“For decades, DOE has cultivated the expertise to meet the nation’s greatest scientific challenges. Now more than ever, we need to invest in a diverse, talented pipeline of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who will be the future science and innovation leaders of this country,” said Under Secretary of Science and Innovation Geraldine Richmond. “I’m thrilled these outstanding students will help us tackle critical research at our labs, and I know their futures are bright.”
Since 2014, the SCGSR program has provided more than 870 U.S. graduate awardees from 155 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, more than 40% of SCGSR awardees are women, about 14% of the awardees attend minority serving institutions (MSIs), and 17.5% are from institutions in jurisdictions that are part of the Establishing Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCOR).
SCGSR awardees work on research projects of significant importance to the Office of Science mission that address societal challenges at national and international scales. Awards were made through the SCGSR program’s second of two annual solicitation cycles for FY 2021.
