Coutu Receives Presidential Early Career Award

12 December 2001 -- Stéphane Coutu, assistant professor of physics, has been named as a recipient of the 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young scientists and engineers at the outset of their independent research careers. Coutu will receive the award at a ceremony and reception in his honor in Washington, DC.

Established by President Clinton in February 1996 and administered by the U. S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, the award provides up to five years of funding for research in support of critical government missions. Eight federal organizations select nominees whose accomplishments indicate their potential to broadly advance the science and technology that will be of greatest benefit to the mission of those federal agencies. Coutu was nominated for the award by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Coutu is an experimental physicist whose primary research interests are elementary particles and fields. His projects include high-energy cosmic rays and air showers; particle astrophysics; and the origin, propagation, and composition of high-energy cosmic particles--both matter and antimatter. "I am interested in experimental high-energy particle astrophysics, which is the study of the universe at the point where the mind-boggingly vast meets the infinitesimally tiny, and at energies beyond the reach of terrestrial particle accelerators," he explains.

Coutu is involved in several NASA-supported missions including the High-Energy Antimatter Telescope (HEAT) program, a series of high-altitude balloon-borne experiments flown to the very edges of the atmosphere, essentially into space, to study antimatter in cosmic radiation. "The ongoing HEAT effort has yielded the world's best high-energy positron and antiproton measurements, which have taught us much about the origin and propagation of cosmic rays," he says.

He also is involved in the Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) project, an effort to build an advanced balloon payload to measure the mass composition of very-high-energy cosmic rays. "This will be the first experiment to take advantage of an emergent technology for ultra-long-duration balloons, which will allow instruments to stay aloft for up to 100 consecutive days," Coutu explains. "These new balloons will increase the total exposure possible for the study of rare-particle phenomena, and will permit the resolution of long-standing questions such as the exact make-up of the high-energy particle flux."

Coutu also is a participant in studies for the next generation of space-borne high-energy cosmic-ray detectors, such as NASA's ACCESS detector scheduled to be launched in about 2007, which could be operated on the International Space Station. Says Coutu, "While NASA has been generous in its support of my research activities, there never seem to be enough resources to carry out all of the activities we could and would dearly love to. This award, and the additional support it provides, will allow us to go the extra mile, not only to extract all the best possible science out of these various projects, but to expand their scope significantly as well."

Coutu's non-NASA activities include participation in the Pierre Auger Observatory project. This is a large international undertaking with contributions from twelve countries. The U.S. effort is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. "Auger is an ambitious plan to construct two huge arrays of detectors, each the size of Rhode Island, one in the northern hemisphere, and one in the southern, to study the highest-energy particles in the Universe and to open up a new window on the physical world," he explains. Construction of the southern array has begun in western Argentina, and should be completed in about four years, around which time construction of the northern site should have just begun.

Coutu earned his bachelor's degree with first-class honors in physics in 1987 at McGill University in Canada. He earned his master's degree in 1989 in physics and his doctoral degree in physics in 1993 at the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan until he joined the faculty of Penn State in the fall of 1997.

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