Physics Doctoral Students Awarded Prestigious Fellowships

Three Penn Physics and Astronomy graduate students have earned some of the most prestigious fellowships in particle physics. Each has already made valuable contributions to the world of physics:

Richard Bonventre was awarded an Owen Chamberlain Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The three-year appointment is in the area of experimental particle physics and cosmology. Bonventre works on the SNO+ experiment at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, which investigates the properties of neutrinos and the core of the sun. SNO+ involves studying whether neutrinos are their own anti-particles by searching for the rare neutrino-less double beta decay in nuclei. 

James Saxon, who works on the Energy Frontier ATLAS experiment, was awarded an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. The fellowship is “intended to attract outstanding early-career scientists to the University of Chicago.” Saxon’s recent research has concentrated on the operations of the TRT subdetector and on photon identification in the context of the Higgs to two photon analysis.  

Douglas Schaefer, who also works on the ATLAS experiment, received a CERN Fellowship. He will work at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, continuing to searching for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy.