Physics Department

Dr. DeYoung’s new grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded last summer, will support the Hope College Nuclear Group in their ongoing research on campus as well as at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State.

Through one project, DeYoung and his students are examining the specifics of nuclear reactions and the decays that happen in supernovae, which involve unimaginably massive nuclear blasts, and the merging of neutron stars across the millennia have played — and continue to play — in generating the elements found throughout the universe.  It’s research that the Hope group is pursuing with the NSCL’s Summing NaI (SuN) group, an international team of scientists focused on nuclear astrophysics.

In the other project, the Hope group, along with the national Modular Neutron Array (MoNA) collaboration, is seeking to understand the force that holds the nucleus together.  The team is studying nuclei that have had many extra neutrons added, to see how they behave.

New NSF Grant Supports Hope Nuclear Group in Asking Big Questions

When the current three-year award concludes, Paul and the Nuclear Group will have had 37 years of continuous funding from the NSF.

At the recent Faculty Recognition Luncheon, Dr. Paul DeYoung was the recipient of the Ruth and John Reed Faculty Achievement Award. The annual award is given to a faculty member “who is first a superior teacher and who also contributes significantly in some other area of professional life.”

His nomination letter read in part:

Paul has the willingness and expertise to teach nearly the entire physics curriculum from the algebra-based introductory course up through quantum mechanics. He is scheduled to teach the single course of the core physics offerings that he has not taught yet, Statistical Mechanics, next fall.

…

Paul’s research program received its first funding in response to an RUI request to the NSF during his first semester at Hope College. Since that first award in 1986 the funding has been continuous.

Congratulations Paul!