Stony Brook University Professor Honored for Lifetime Achievements

STONY BROOK, NY — Stony Brook Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dr. Jacobus J.M. Verbaarschot, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award in recognition of his lifetime achievements in research.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards annually to foreign scholars from all disciplines from abroad whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact in their discipline. Award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany.

The $70,000 award granted to Verbaarschot will be used to establish a long-term collaboration with Professor Tilo Wettig of Universitaet Regensburg in Germany to research the theory of strong interactions, which is known at Quantum Chromo Dynamics, or QCD.

The theory describes the nuclear forces and the heavy ion collisions that take place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Verbaarschot's goal is to understand the properties of matter at such large densities that the Earth would fit into a football stadium.

Verbaarschot joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1987. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands in1982 and did his post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. During his tenure at Stony Brook, he spent one year (1988-89) at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), where the largest particle accelerator of the world is presently under construction, and one year (2006-07) at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

Verbaarschot has published over 150 research articles and will begin conducting research in Regensburg during January 2008, and during the summer for period of five to six years.