Physicist Richard Longland Receives DOE Early Career Research Award

Richard Longland, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at NC State, has received a 2017 Early Career Research award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). These awards support the development of individual research programs of outstanding scientists early in their careers and stimulate research careers in the disciplines supported by the DOE’s Office of Science.

The award will support one of Longland’s research projects, investigating indirect methods to determine the hard-to-measure nuclear reactions occurring in stars. This involves developing a new dedicated facility: the Facility for Experiments of Nuclear Reactions in Stars, a charged-particle spectrograph at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory in Durham. This research on the life cycles of stars will contribute to our overall understanding of how the elements in the universe were made.

Longland received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006 and 2010, respectively, after obtaining a M.Phys degree in physics with satellite technology from the University of Surrey (U.K.) in 2004.