Fellow Chosen to Attend Nobel Laureate Gathering

A recipient of the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE NNSA SSGF) is going to Lindau, Germany, this summer to meet with Nobel Prize winners in science.

Officials with the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings chose Miguel Holgado of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to attend this year’s gathering. The annual event brings together science prize winners to meet in small groups with 600 selected young scientists from around the world.

This year’s conference will focus on dark matter and cosmology, laser physics and gravitational waves. The 2018 physics winners, Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou, will join 40 other Nobelists at the meeting June 30 to July 5, the meeting’s website says.

Holgado, a third-year DOE NNSA SSGF recipient, studies gravitational-wave astrophysics and how they relate to binary compact-object mergers – the union of compressed, massive objects such as neutron stars and giant stars. The melding of these dense bodies produces the powerful gravitational waves that exquisitely sensitive Earth-based instruments such as LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) detect billions of light years from their sources.

Holgado earned his bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University in 2014. He is studying with advisor Paul Ricker at Illinois.