LAS Physicist Professor Named to American Association for the Advancement of Science
UIC News reports that Nikos Varelas, LAS professor of physics, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the highly regarded peer-reviewed journal Science." Professor Varelas, who is recognized for his work in experimental particle physics is among new 388 AAAS fellows for the year 2014. UIC News continues:
Varelas’ research in high-energy particle physics focuses on the building blocks of matter and the forces that bind them together.
Over the last two decades — as part of the D-Zero experiment at Fermilab and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — he has investigated the strong interaction that binds quarks together into protons and neutrons.
The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment includes over 3,500 scientists, organized into groups, attacking different aspects of the experiment from building the detector to processing and analyzing the enormous amount of data.
He was also involved in the search for the Higgs boson new subatomic particles. With his team at UIC, he established that quarks behave like fundamental entities down to the level of one thousandth of a trillionth the size of a human hair.
Varelas received his B.Sc. from the University of Athens and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester. After three years as a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University, he joined the UIC physics faculty in 1997. He has also been a guest scientist at Fermilab.
A 2013 University Scholar, he received the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Service Award in 2012.
Source: UIC News: Jeanne Galatzer-Levy