Assistant Professor of Physics Luchang Jin has been chosen to receive a prestigious Early Career Award from the US Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics (HEP) for 2020. The amount of the award is $750,000 to be used over five years. The DOE Early Career Award is extremely competitive: this year only 16 scientists in HEP in the US were awarded such grants, and only 76 scientists across the entire DOE. Dr. Jin will use the grant to support his research using numerical methods to study how electromagnetic interactions affect the decays of mesons, subatomic particles composed of a quark and anti-quark pair. This study, carried out within the framework of the fundamental Standard Model of Particle Physics, is expected to improve our knowledge of the interactions between quarks and the Weak gauge bosons. With some luck, Professor Jin’s research may provide evidence of new interactions or particles yet to be discovered.