NEW YORK (TIP): Raju Venugopalan, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award for his remarkable achievements in theoretical nuclear physics. This prestigious international award – issued by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany – comes with a prize of

60,000 (nearly $70,000 U.S.) and the opportunity to collaborate with German researchers at Heidelberg University and elsewhere. Venugopalan joins 13 other Brookhaven National Laboratory physicists who have received this award since 1974.

“This is a great honor and I’m delighted to be in the company of other Humboldt winners over the past years,” Venugopalan said in a press release. “This award gives me a wonderful opportunity to build on and establish new collaborations with my colleagues in Germany, where I’ve been on sabbatical at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University for the past year. I look forward to widening and deepening these connections.”

Since 2009, Raju Venugopalan has served as an adjunct professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts & Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook in 1992. He came to Brookhaven Lab as an Assistant Physicist in 1998. He rose through the ranks, receiving a tenure appointment in 2002, and has held the title of Senior Scientist since 2007. From 2010 to 2015 he served as Group Leader of the Lab’s Nuclear Theory Group, ranked highest among 62 DOE-supported university and lab groups during that time. Venugopalan took a sabbatical as an Excellence Initiative Guest Professor at Heidelberg University’s Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2015-2016, and returned to his Group Leader role this fall.

Prior to joining Brookhaven, Venugopalan held post-doctoral appointments at the University of Minnesota (1992-94), the University of Washington (1994-96), and the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen (1997-98).