The Grainger College of Engineering
Physics

Neubauer receives 2011 NSF CAREER Award

7/17/2011 Celia Elliott

Assistant Professor of Physics Mark S. Neubauer has been awarded a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation to develop hardware and software for the ATLAS experiment at the LHC.

Written by Celia Elliott

Assistant Professor of Physics Mark S. Neubauer has been awarded a prestigious 2011 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) initiative selects the nation's best young university faculty in a highly competitive annual program. These teacher-scholars are recognized for their extraordinary promise to integrate research and education in the nation's universities and to make lifelong contributions to their disciplines.

Neubauer will use the five-year award to develop a fast hardware tracker (FTK) system as an upgrade to the current trigger system for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

In hadron collider experiments such as ATLAS, triggering the detector to store interesting events for later analysis is extremely challenging because of the huge numbers and multiple types of particles produced in the collisions. The FTK system, which is being designed to exploit unique signatures in the detectors used to track charged particles, will be critical in maintaining optimum efficiency and stability for the ATLAS trigger as the luminosity of the LHC increases over time.

In addition to the FTK hardware work, Neubauer will also develop innovative strategies for processing, analyzing, and visualizing the petabytes of data being generated by ATLAS.

"This project will significantly advance the use of hardware and computing parallelization and collaborative visualization as tools to develop the new standard model," said Neubauer. "It will lead to new strategies for handling petabyte-scale data for scientific discovery and for implementing highly parallelized pattern-recognition systems for use in triggering at hadron collider experiments. The long-term objective of this project is to advance research and education in physics through the innovative use of state-of-the-art electronics and computing systems that will take parallel processing to the extreme."

Madeline Stover is a physics doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying atmospheric dynamics applied to forest conservation. She interns as a science writer for Illinois Physics, where she also co-hosts the podcast Emergence along with fellow physics graduate student Mari Cieszynski. When Stover is not doing research or communications, she enjoys hosting her local radio show, singing with her band, and cooking with friends.

Daniel Inafuku graduated from Illinois Physics with a PhD and now works as a science writer. At Illinois, he conducted scientific research in mathematical biology and mathematical physics. In addition to his research interests, Daniel is a science video media creator.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Ph. D. is a science writer and an educator. She teaches college and high school physics and mathematics courses, and her writing has been published in popular science outlets such as WIRED, Scientific American, Physics World, and New Scientist. She earned a Ph. D. in Physics from UIUC in 2019 and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jamie Hendrickson is a writer and content creator in higher education communications. They earned their M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021. In addition to their communications work, they are a published area studies scholar and Russian-to-English translator.

Garrett R. Williams is an Illinois Physics Ph.D. Candidate and science writer. He has been recognized as the winner of the 2020 APS History of Physics Essay Competition and as a finalist in the 2021 AAAS Science and Human Rights Essay Competition. He was also an invited author in the 2021 #BlackinPhysics Week series published by Physics Today and Physics World. 

 

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Ph. D. is a science writer and an educator. She teaches college and high school physics and mathematics courses, and her writing has been published in popular science outlets such as WIRED, Scientific American, Physics World, and New Scientist. She earned a Ph. D. in Physics from UIUC in 2019 and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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This story was published July 17, 2011.