Saskia Mioduszewski is a nuclear physicist and professor at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

Education

Mioduszewski completed an undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics in 1994 at North Carolina State University. In 2000, she obtained her PhD in physics from the

University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state ...

. Her PhD thesis was called ''Centrality dependence of antiproton production in Proton-Nucleus Collisions at 17.5 and 12.3 GeV''.

Career

Between 2000 and 2005, Mioduszewski was a postdoctoral research associate at

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment c ...

. During this time, she contributed to the PHENIX Experiment at the

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by a ...

(RHIC). In 2005, she became an assistant professor at

. She continues to work with the RHIC on the

STAR Collaboration The STAR detector (for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) is one of the four experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory, United States. The primary scientific objective of STAR is to study the formation an ...

and is a member of the Cyclotron Institute. She is interested in studying ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In particular, she studies the transition between nuclear or "hadronic" matter and the state known as

Quark Gluon Plasma A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly ...

. An application of Mioduszewski's work is in replicating conditions similar to just after the Big Bang by colliding gold particles accelerated to nearly the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit ...

. The result of the high-speed collisions is a new particle called an " anti-hypertriton". The particles then cool and decay over lifetimes shorter than

nanosecond A nanosecond (ns) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one billionth of a second, that is, of a second, or 10 seconds. The term combines the SI prefix ''nano-'' indicating a 1 billionth submultiple of an SI unit ( ...

timescales. These experiments are carried out at RHIC and may help improve understanding of nuclear interactions as well as the distribution of matter and

antimatter In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioac ...

in the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. ...

. Today, matter appears to be far more prevalent than antimatter, and this asymmetry remains an active research area.

Awards and honours

* 2019 Fellow of the American Physical Society for ''sustained leadership of high-precision measurement of the quark-gluon plasma using direct photons and their correlations with hadrons and jets at the PHENIX and STAR experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider''. * 2018 Presidential Impact Fellow of Texas A&M University. * 2009

Maria Goeppert Mayer Award The Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award is an annual prize presented by the American Physical Society in recognition of an outstanding contribution to physics research by a woman. It recognizes and enhances outstanding achievements by women physicists in ...

for ''her pioneering contributions to the observation of jet quenching and her continuing efforts to understand high- p_T phenomena in relativistic heavy-ion collisions''. * 2006 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. * 2003

Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

. * 1998 Paul H. Stelson Nuclear Physics Award.

Personal life

Mioduszewski is married to Ralf Rapp, another physics professor at Texas A&M University. They have a son.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mioduszewski, Saskia American women physicists American nuclear physicists Fellows of the American Physical Society Living people Brookhaven National Laboratory staff Texas A&M University faculty North Carolina State University alumni University of Tennessee alumni Date of birth missing (living people) Sloan Research Fellows Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women