Two LSU Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards

 

Astrophysicist Manos Chatzolopoulos and physical chemist Tuo Wang are recipients of the 2020 DOE Early Career Research Award. This highly competitive grant is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing significant funding to researchers during crucial early career years when many scientists do their most formative work. Chatzopoulos and Wang are among 76 scientists across the nation to receive the award. 

“Dr. Chatzopoulos and Dr. Wang are representative of the outstanding researchers in the LSU College of Science. The DOE awards will help expand their research efforts and add to the depth and breadth of research happening across LSU,” said Cynthia Peterson, dean of the LSU College of Science. “I extend heartfelt congratulations to my colleagues on receiving such a competitive award and celebrate their contributions to the university’s reputation for research excellence.”

Chatzopoulos, an assistant professor in LSU’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, broad research interests range from massive stellar evolution to supernovae and unusual transient phenomena. He utilizes modern numerical tools to study the evolution of massive stars up to their point of their final fate and beyond in an effort to model the observed properties of their resulting explosions.

“This award will allow our research group to open up new avenues of study and focus on an emerging class of transient phenomena resulting from stellar mergers in some binary systems,” said Chatzopoulos. “It will be the first project to study these “mergeburst” phenomena across all relevant timescales; from the evolution of the initial binary system, to the dynamical merger and, ultimately, the evolution of the post-merger, remnant star.

Wang, an assistant professor in the LSU Department of Chemistry, research interests mainly focus on the development and application of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate the structure, dynamics and interactions of insoluble macromolecules in various biological systems such as the energy-rich plant biomass, disease-related fungal cell walls, viral proteins, and phospholipid membranes. Wang’s DOE-funded project aims at developing solid-state NMR methods to characterize the interactions between the phenolic polymer lignin and polysaccharides, which make the biomass recalcitrant to post-harvest processing.

"The fundamental knowledge will advance our understanding of energy storage in plants, form the foundation for optimizing the utility of lignocellulose for energy and biomaterial, and inspire the rational design of synthetic polymers and composites with tunable structure and properties," said Wang. 

Under the DOE program, university-based researchers will receive grants for at least $150,000 per year, and researchers based at DOE national laboratories will receive grants for at least $500,000 per year. The research grants are planned for five years and will cover salary and research expenses.

To be eligible for the DOE award, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant, or associate professor at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory, who received a Ph.D. within the past 10 years.

Awardees were selected from a large pool of university and national laboratory-based applicants. Selection was based on peer review by outside scientific experts. A full list of the 2020 awardees, their institutions, and titles of research projects is available on the Early Career Research Program webpage.