Early Career Award

Scientist and 2021 URA Early Career Award winner stands at a chalkboard working on equations.

Fermilab’s Pedro Machado has won the 2021 Universities Research Association Early Career Award for his theoretical work on neutrino science that helps experimentalists with novel search strategies and scientific questions worth exploring.

Portrait of a man with dark hair and a short beard and mustache wearing glasses, a brown corduroy jacket, a red and blue plaid shirt. His hands are interlaced on the table in front of him. In the lower left corner, the keyboard of a laptop peeks out. He is in front of a starry background.

What if human analysis, combined with machine learning, could advance the study of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Fermilab scientist Brian Nord a $2.5 million Early Career Research Award to explore that possibility. Nord has envisioned a new hybrid data-analysis method to undertake the project. It integrates the strengths of artificial intelligence and interpretations of statistics in ways that could potentially advance the studies of cosmology.

Fahim AI on-chip data processing work

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Farah Fahim an Early Career Research Award to investigate how deploying neural networks and machine learning on a particle detector can allow data processing at source. Her work could make data processing at detectors more efficient, improving fundamental research at physics facilities like the LHC at CERN.