University of Richmond Physics Professor Awarded National Science Foundation Grant
May 4, 2006
Dr. Mirela Fetea, assistant professor of physics at the University of Richmond, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to support theoretical nuclear structure studies at the university.
Funding of $35,924 has been committed for one year, with an additional two years’ funding possible for a grand total of $109,254. The grant includes summer support for Fetea and her students, plus supplies and travel to meet with collaborators at Yale University and to present results at national or international meetings.
The project intends to further work on theoretical topics of current interest in nuclear physics in line with discoveries over the last couple of years or so while building a community of scholars of nuclear physics at the undergraduate level, Fetea says. It will target nuclear structure topics not fully explored theoretically and experimentally, such as structural evolution, dynamical symmetries, phase transition and critical points, she says. It also will continue the successful collaboration with Yale’s Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory.
Fetea has four students working with her this semester, three of whom will join her at Yale for 10 weeks this summer. They all are partially supported by the NSF grant. The grant also will fully cover summer stipends for six more students over the next three summers and travel to nuclear structure meetings and workshops, Fetea said. She expects to have about 12-13 students involved in the project over its lifetime.
Fetea’s previous NSF grant, “An Investigation of Chirality and Signature Inversion in the 130 and 160 Mass Regions,” is nearing completion and has involved 11 undergraduates over four years, many of whom intend to go to graduate school for nuclear physics, computer science or applied mathematics.