(Cumalat, John P - 2010) -- Robert L. Stearns Award
Overview
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Professor Cumalat, who joined the CU-Boulder faculty in 1981, is recognized for his long history of extraordinary contributions to the university and a career marked by many achievements. An experimental elementary particle physicist, Cumalat focuses his research on the study of strong interaction production mechanisms and the subsequent weak decay of quark “charm” and “beauty” states. He has conducted experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. For the past several years, Cumalat has served as a spokesman for the Fermi project, and he is involved in the development of new devices and techniques to be used for elementary particle detection. In 2009 Cumalat was elected a fellow of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science for his leadership in the design and implementation of beams, detectors, and data analysis in multiple Fermilab experiments producing lasting measure- ment of properties of charmed particles. Cumulat is involved in the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator project located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research facility (known as CERN), where scientists study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. He is part of a team using the world’s brawniest particle accelerator to attempt to recreate the conditions immediately following the Big Bang and to better understand mysterious dark matter, dark energy, and fundamental physics.
