Bloom using CAREER grant to bring physics to rural Nebraska schools

Kenneth Bloom grew up near New York City and has spent most of his life near metropolitan areas. The presence of schools in Nebraska's wide-open, rural spaces, far-removed from the facilities and expertise of the state's metropolitan universities, spurred the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to think of ways to bring science assets to more students.

To that end, he has secured a prestigious CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce the world of university physics to rural areas of Nebraska. So far, Bloom has visited Loup County Public School in central Nebraska and Keya Paha County High School in north-central Nebraska. He brings a particle physics mini-lab, including an electron gun, to demonstrate behavior of elementary particles.

Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grants are awarded to early-career faculty who effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Bloom's award is $550,000 over five years.

Bloom has been at UNL since 2004 conducting research in experimental particle physics. It's an area of science concerned with the smallest constituents of matter and the most fundamental questions of how the universe came to be and what holds it together -- or not. The grant will also help sustain his research in that realm.

UNL scientists and facilities are playing a key role in one of the world's largest physics experiments. The Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, experiment for the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, will be run at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. Scheduled to begin in 2007 and run for 10 years or longer, the experiment will explore the frontiers of energy, matter, space and time.

The CAREER grant will support Bloom's work in using the CMS experiment to develop ways to study and make precise measurements of the properties of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary sub-atomic particle.

CONTACT: Kenneth Bloom, Asst. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, (402) 472-6093