Dima Vaido awarded Honorable Mention in 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

LSU Physics student Dzmitry Vaido is a recipient of the 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, or GRFP, Honorable Mention.

“We are very proud of Dima for receiving this honor. It recognizes what we in the Physics and Astronomy Department have known for some time; that Mr. Vaido is a talented, creative, and hardworking student that has an exciting future as a physicist ahead of him. This is a well-deserved honor recognizing his academic and research accomplishments,” said Professor John DiTusa, chair, LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy.

His current research involves ‘Use of Cold Atomic Gases to Study Cosmological Phenomena,’ with Dr. Daniel Sheehy in LSU’s Condensed Matter and Ultracold Atom Theory group. Vaido also conducts research with Dr. Robert DiStasio in Computational Physical Chemistry group at Cornell University, resulting from his participation in Cornell’s summer REU program in 2019.

“Dima is interested in a wide range of physics topics, and had the initiative to come up with this project at the interface of atomic physics and cosmology”, said Dr. Sheehy

In addition, Vaido presented “Simulating Cosmological Inflation Using Bose-Einstein Condensation,” for the LSU Discover Day program, and contributed the results of his work at 2019 Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Vaido, a Minsk, Belarus native, is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Crystallographic Association, the Society of Physics Students – LSU Chapter, Sigma Pi Sigma. In 2019, he was awarded the Johnny Dardenne, Sr. – Texas Tiger Tournament Scholarship from The LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy.

Slightly more than 2,000 students nationwide won the GRFP and little more than 1,500 received honorable mentions. This year, LSU had four Fellowship winners, and seven students who received Honorable Mentions.

The program was developed by the NSF to create a highly motivated and capable workforce dedicated to ensuring the nation’s leadership in advancing STEM-related innovations. The selected fellows are expected to become respected thought leaders and knowledge experts in their given fields. Recipients also benefit from opportunities for international research and professional development and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education they choose.

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Mimi LaValle

LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy

225-439-5633

mlavall@lsu.edu