Pictured here during a visit to CERN, Archana Anandakrishnan, graduate student advised by Prof. Stuart Raby, was recently awarded an OSU Presidential Fellowship. 

The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School to recognize the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project.

The Presidential Fellowship provides financial support so that each Presidential fellow may devote one year of full-time study to the completion of his or her dissertation or degree project unimpeded by other duties. Competitions are held autumn and spring semesters.

The following is the abstract excerpt from her nomination:

Understanding the building blocks of nature: What lies beyond the TeV?

ABSTRACT

A large amount of data has been collected and analyzed since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operations. It is hoped that the LHC will reveal physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. I work on theories with a new symmetry of nature called Supersymmetry (SUSY) between fermions and bosons. SUSY solves many problems with our current understanding of nature at its smallest scales (or highest energies) like easing the unification of the gauge couplings and providing a candidate for dark matter. My work has been crucial in testing supersymmetric grand unified theories (GUTs) against the experimental data. Using fits to experimental results, my collaborators and I have made important predictions for these models regarding the properties of the Higgs boson and the discovery potential of a new supersymmetric particle, the gluino at the next run of the LHC. During the course of this study, we developed an extensive set of computational tools that we believe will set the standards for future studies of supersymmetric GUTs.

Congratulations Archana!