SU junior receives prestigious 2012 Goldwater Scholarship

Ryan Badman, a junior math and physics major in The College of Arts and Sciences, received a 2012 Goldwater Scholarship. The highly competitive, national award is presented to outstanding students who are pursuing careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. Badman is one of 282 nationwide scholars to receive the 2012 award.

Badman is a Renée Crown University Honors student and a Coronat Scholar, the highest award presented in The College of Arts and Sciences. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in high-energy physics. Since arriving at SU, Badman has worked on research projects in the laboratories of several faculty members in the Department of Physics. The experiences enabled him to find his passion—high-energy physics. He has worked with the high-energy physics group on a project to build the next-generation particle detectors for the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva Switzerland.

Over past year, Badman worked with Simon Catterall, a theoretical physicist, on conjectured new theories of strongly interacting particles, which might describe the Higgs boson currently being sought for at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Badman has been accepted into the University of Michigan’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at CERN, where he will spend the summer working directly with CERN researchers.

Goldwater scholarships cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year. The Goldwater Scholarship program was created in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater and is the premier undergraduate award of its type. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, a federally endowed agency, administers the program.

Badman is also the recipient of a 2011-12 Astronaut Scholarship, presented to top science and engineering students who exhibit exceptional performance, initiative and creativity in their field.