KSU Physics PhD student Maci Kesler has received a prestigious US Department of Energy (DOE) award for the purpose of conducting research during 2025 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This award is sponsored by (SCGSR) program with the goal of preparing US graduate students to enter employment of critical importance to the DOE mission, to secure our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation, and to train the next generation of scientific leaders. For each award period, typically only about 5 to 10 SCGSR grants are funded for research across the many STEM areas being investigated at Brookhaven.
Keslers doctoral research at Kent State, under the supervision of Prof. Zhangbu Xu, focuses on high-energy nuclear collisions. At Brookhaven, she will work with Dr. Rongrong Ma on a project titled . Her research will contribute to the development of a novel imaging technique that will eventually be used at the (EIC)a major accelerator facility currently under construction at Brookhaven and expected to begin operation in the 2030s.
The project seeks to map the distribution of strong-force carriers, gluons, that bind quarks inside atomic nuclei. By analyzing diffractive scattering patterns of electrons colliding with heavy nuclei travelling at close to light speed, Keslers technique aims to reveal unprecedented details about gluons inside nuclei at the smallest scales. The challenge, she explains, is similar to restoring a blurred photographexcept the image being reconstructed is a trillionth of an inch in size.
My technique can be developed and tested using measurements from data already recorded by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, an existing Brookhaven facility, explained Kesler. Working with Rongrong Ma at Brookhaven, alongside many local collaborators on related nuclear programs, has been so inspiring and is a huge door opener to all the different types of investigation going on at that major National Lab.
Maci graduated in 2022 from the University of Nevada Las Vegas with a BS degree in physics, and entered the KSU PhD program in Fall 2022.
