Wayne State Professor Sean Gavin has been selected to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) that will be presented today by President George W. Bush at a special ceremony at the U.S. Department of Treasury.  

          The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. Government on scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of their careers. Gavin will be among a total of 58 recipients -- 20 like him who were nominated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and 38 others nominated by other government agencies.  He is the only professor from Michigan to receive the award this year.  

“These Presidential awardees are the young people who will lead our nation’s progress in science and engineering as they leap the fences, cross the boundaries and build the blocks of new and exciting areas of science,” said Arden L. Bement, Jr., NSF director.  “They also pass on to many students their imaginative thinking, built into creative educational activities – a form of leadership that can influence career choices and help invigorate the science and engineering enterprise.” 

 Gavin received the award for his innovative research in physics theory related to the Big Bang. His research involves data from experiments conducted at a large “atom smasher” called RHIC at the federal government’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY . These experiments smash gold atoms together at near light-speed in an attempt to re-create the conditions that existed shortly after the birth of the universe. Gavin’s research analyzes these collisions to look for evidence of quark gluon plasma, the same state of matter thought to exist shortly after the Big Bang. 

He also developed a community outreach project tied to his research that will train K-12 teachers to help students better understand scientific theories in a historical and social context.  

“As a child, I was captivated by the human drama of scientific research portrayed in popular books like The Double Helix, and in stories about Einstein, the Manhattan Project and Marie Curie,” said Gavin, explaining his reason for developing a training course for teachers.

“But growing up in lower-middle class Manhattan , I somehow found those inspiring books by myself – not in school. In recent years, that got me to thinking about how I, as a university educator, could bring the excitement of science to similarly disadvantaged children in urban Detroit .”

Gavin, who is married and lives in Plymouth, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and both a master’s and Ph.D in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a member of the physics faculty at Wayne State since 1998 and is currently an associate professor.