HU Professor Receives Government Funding for Research

Dr. Michael Kohl

Hampton, VA - A Hampton University professor is one of only 69 recipients across the nation to receive funding under the United States Department of Energy’s new Early Career Research Program. The five-year research grants of this program are enabled by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Dr. Michael Kohl, assistant professor of physics at HU, was selected from 1,750 applicants through a peer review process. To be eligible for the award, applicants were either tenure-track assistant professors who had received a Ph.D. within the past 10 years or employed at a DOE national laboratory.

The awardees received funding for research in the fields of: advanced scientific computing research, basic energy sciences, biological and environmental research, fusion energy sciences, high-energy physics, or nuclear physics. Kohl is one of six recipients who will receive his funding from the Office of Nuclear Physics for his proposal “Search for Time Reversal Symmetry Violation with TREK at J-PARC.”

TREK is an experiment to search for violation of time reversal invariance at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex. Kohl will receive $794,000 for five years to continue his research. He has also received one grant from the National Science Foundation in the amount of $405,000 and will receive another of $216,000.

All of these grants, totaling over $1.4 million, were generated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also known as the Stimulus Act. The DOE grant will create jobs by allowing Kohl to hire undergraduate and graduate students as well as a postdoctoral researcher to assist with the project. The grant will also cover travel funds to Japan and the development of a particle detector.

Kohl has been at HU for two years in the joint position of assistant professor and staff research scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Before coming to HU, Kohl attended the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany where he received his diploma degree in 1996 and doctorate degree in physics in 2001. He served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2003 through 2007.