Fröhlich Named 2014 Cottrell Scholar

Dr. Carla Fröhlich, assistant professor in the Department of Physics, has been named a 2014 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement (RCSA) for her proposal, “The Origin of the Heaviest Nuclei in the Universe.”

The Cottrell Scholar program only accepts 10 percent of applicants; its award winners are elite chemists and physicists from around the country. The main goal of the program is to promote and support the university scholar model in which faculty members consistently demonstrate excellent research programs and innovative approaches to student learning at the undergraduate level.

Fröhlich’s research interests lie in theoretical nuclear astrophysics, focusing on the origin of the elements. Her work includes studying core collapse supernovae as nucleosynthesis site, identifying critical nuclear and neutrino physics for nucleosynthesis, abundances in metal-poor halo stars, and the origin of the elements heavier than iron. Her main contributions are the discovery of a new nucleosynthesis process, the Neutrino p-Process, which for the first time allows explanation for the observed abundances in the most metal-poor stars, and the prediction of neutron star mass and nickel yields from core collapse supernova simulations.

Fröhlich received her PhD in physics in 2007 from the University of Basel in Switzerland. She spent three years as an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining the NC State faculty in 2010.

The Cottrell Scholar Awards began in 1994 in honor of Frederick Gardner Cottrell, a scientist, inventor and philanthropist. Cottrell founded the RCSA to provide support for scientific research and experimentation at scholarly institutions.