The American Physical Society has selected Christina Markert, a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin, as a 2021 APS Fellow. Fellowships are awarded based on outstanding contributions to the field of physics, and are received by no more than one half of one percent of the society's members each year.
Markert studies a state of matter that physicists think existed very early in our universe's history, less than a second after the Big Bang, called a quark-gluon plasma. It's basically a soup of elementary particles that only exists at unimaginably high temperatures and/or density. By smashing heavy ions together in particle accelerators, she and her colleagues attempt to create this plasma in the laboratory and study its properties. She is a collaborator on experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC collider and CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
The APS indicates Markert's selection as a fellow is in recognition of her "scientific leadership of experimental studies of hadronic resonances and their role as probes of the dynamics of relativistic heavy-ion collisions and chiral symmetry restoration in deconfined QCD matter."
Markert joined the physics faculty at UT Austin in 2006. She received her Ph.D. from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany in 2001. Before UT Austin, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Yale University and a senior research scientist at Kent State University.
To view a complete list of the 2021 recipients of APS Fellowships, visit the APS Fellow Archive.
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