Recently promoted to full professor of physics, Matthias Grosse Perdekamp has been selected by the University of Illinois Office of the Provost for the 2013 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award.
Nominees for this award are selected from a large pool of stellar scholars through a rigorous promotion review process conducted by the Campus Committee on Promotion and Tenure, identifying scholars whose contributions and achievements within their respective fields are particularly excellent. Grosse-Perdekamp is one of four campus faculty members to receive this honor this year.
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Ilesanmi Adesida said, "Professor Grosse-Perdekamp was recommended to me for this special recognition based on the scope, quality, and impact of his scholarship, teaching, service, and engagement efforts. His accomplishments stood out as particularly remarkable."
Matthias Grosse Perdekamp works in experimental high-energy nuclear physics. He is a member of the
PHENIX experiment at the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The PHENIX collaboration, which includes 498 physicists and engineers from 70 institutions in 14 countries, engages in a broad program of studying QCD phenomena, including the physics of heavy-ion collisions, the spin-dependent structure of the proton in polarized proton-proton collisions, and nucleon structure in a nuclear environment in proton- or deuteron-ion collisions. Gross Perdekamp has taken a leadership role in PHENIX's spin-physics program, which will employ the polarization of the proton beams at the RHIC collider to perform spin-dependent measurements at the highest energy scales yet explored.
Grosse Perdekamp received his
diplom in physics from Freiburg University in 1990, and his doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1995. He was an associate research scientist at Yale University from 1995 to 1998, and a research scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, from 1998 to 1999. In 2002, he was selected as a RIKEN Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility. He joined the faculty at Physics Illinois as an assistant professor in 2002, remaining a Fellow at RIKEN through 2007. He was the recipient of the Xerox Research Award in 2008 and was named a Willett Faculty Scholar in 2010.