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.
New NSF Grant Supports Hope Nuclear Group in Asking Big Questions
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.
When the current three-year award concludes, Paul and the Nuclear Group will have had 37 years of continuous funding from the NSF.