Learning more about the properties of extreme matter — created through high-energy particle collisions approaching the speed of light and analyzed with the help of sophisticated advanced computing — might seem the stuff of science fiction, but it’s Caleb Broodo’s day job.
Broodo, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Houston’s College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, is spending a year at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York as part of the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program, a selective award giving graduate students access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories.
“We’re looking at matter that’s pushed to its absolute limits,” Broodo said. “Once you figure that out, you have potentially the entire knowledge base of how matter behaves. This is matter that exists on such a small time scale — on the order of microseconds — but its behavior has astronomical implications.”
Broodo graduated from UH in 2022 with a degree in electrical engineering — he played center as a walk on for the Cougar basketball team, scoring the first points of his college career during the 2019 NCAA tournament — before pivoting to particle physics for graduate school.
To read the full story, click here! And click here for a profile we did of Broodo in 2021.