DOE names six Argonne scientists who have been awarded the Early Career Research Program

Six researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory (DOE) have received the DOE Early Career Research Program awards for fiscal year 2021.

Argonne scientists Corey Adams, Melina Avila Coronado, Lindsey Bleem, Si Chen, Sheng Di, and Xueying Lu are among the 83 scientists across the country to receive the coveted funding and recognition.

“Maintaining our nation’s trust in world-class scientists and researchers is a top priority for DOE – and that means we must provide them with the resources they need to thrive early in their careers,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm. “These award winners show exceptional potential for overcoming America’s greatest challenges and ensuring our economic competitiveness for decades to come.”

As part of the DOE’s 12th Early Career Research Program, each recipient will receive at least $ 500,000 per year for five years to advance their research. A program of the DOE Office of Science, the award empowers the country’s academic workforce by providing financial support to exceptional researchers in their critical early career years, when many are doing their most formative work.

Corey Adams is a computer science assistant at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a user facility of the DOE Office of Science, and a member of the Medium Energy Group in Argonne’s physics division. Originally a high energy physicist working on neutrino physics problems, he now works at the interface between basic experimental physics and the application of deep learning and machine learning techniques to scientific problems – including neutrino physics – on high-performance supercomputers. He received the DOE award for his research into building a background-free, normally ordered neutrino-free double beta decay demonstrator of normal order.

Adams’ research was selected for funding by the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics.

Melina Avila Coronado is assistant to the physicist and experimenter in the Low Energy group of the Argonne Department of Physics. After completing her PhD in Physics from Florida State University, she joined Argonne as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014 and reached her current position in 2016. Her research focuses on studying nuclear reactions in order to better understand the abundance of elements observed in nature and how they form various star processes.

Avila Coronado’s research has been selected by the DOE Nuclear Physics Office for funding that will aid their research in measuring key nuclear reactions for an astrophysical process known as the weak r-process.

Lindsey Bleem, The assistant physicist in Argonne is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Her research interests focus on constraining physical models of our universe through cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and galaxy surveys. Bleem’s award will support their work to maximize dark energy constraints through next generation CMB cluster surveys.

The DOE Office for High Energy Physics selected Bleem’s research for funding.

Si Chen is a physicist at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), a user facility of the DOE Office of Science. Among other things, she led the development of the Bionanoprobe, a hard X-ray scanning nanoprobe with cryogenic capabilities and the world’s first instrument of its kind. The DOE award will support Chen’s research in developing an innovative multi-scale imaging platform that includes an X-ray nanoprobe and a plasma focused one Ion beam combined.

Chen’s research was selected for funding by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Sheng Di. is a computer scientist in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in Argonne. His current research interests include lossy compression for scientific datasets, high performance computing, scalable computing, and fault tolerance. Dr. Di leads several data reduction projects funded by the DOE and the National Science Foundation. He is the co-founder and lead developer of the state-of-the-art lossy compressor SZ, which serves important DOE applications in various fields: cosmology, quantum chemistry, crystallography, molecular dynamics and others.

Di’s Award was selected for funding by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and will support its work on scalable dynamic scientific data reduction.

Xueying Lu came to the Argonne Accelerator Institute and the APS Accelerator Systems Division in 2020 as a joint faculty appointment with Northern Illinois University. The DOE Award will support their work on innovative Wakefield acceleration technologies at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator.

Lu’s research was selected for funding by the DOE High Energy Physics Office.

“These distinguished researchers are valued members of our diverse, world-class talent community. They are making impressive new discoveries and delivering advanced technology for our nation’s prosperity and security,” said Laboratory Director Paul K. Kearns. “Receiving this award from the US Department of Energy is a significant milestone in her career and we at Argonne are honored to recognize it.”

The winners were selected from a large and highly competitive pool of national applicants from laboratories and universities. 32 of the 2021 recipients are from national DOE laboratories and 51 from US universities.

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Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. Argonne is the country’s first national laboratory and conducts cutting-edge and applied scientific research in almost all scientific disciplines. Argonne Researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of corporations, universities, and federal, state and local authorities to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership, and prepare the nation for a brighter future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is administered by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The Department of Energy at the Department of Energy is the leading proponent of basic science in the United States, working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. Further information can be found at https://energy.gov/science.

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