Colorado State University Graduate Student Receives Prestigious Wigner Post-doctoral Fellowship Award

Note to Reporters: A photo of Mark Berrill is available with the news release at http://www.news.colostate.edu/ or http://www.flickr.com/photos/coloradostateuniversity.

Colorado State University graduate student Mark Berrill has been selected as a Wigner Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Program.

Each national laboratory offers only a few of these post-doctoral competitive awards. More than 100 applicants apply each year, and only four to seven are selected.

“Being chosen for the Wigner Fellowship is a high honor. It is a very competitive process that resulted in an interview at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” said Berrill. “I have worked very hard toward this goal and am very excited about the opportunity for research offered through the fellowship.”

The Wigner Fellowship Program is a highly competitive two-year appointment that offers a unique early career opportunity at the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest and most diverse science and energy laboratory. The program is designed to provide research opportunities for exceptional new scientists.

Berrill is completing his doctoral work at the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology, a multi-organizational center that is based at Colorado State University. His research focuses on computational modeling of extreme ultraviolet lasers. Berrill has created a number of computer models that are designed to stimulate the physics that occurs during the experiments. The models help generate a better understanding of how the lasers work, which can be critical for use in the semiconductor and other industries.

In addition to his research, Berrill has received numerous awards and honors, including the DOE Computational Science Fellowship in 2006, a competitive graduate fellowship for research in an area of computational science.

The Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship Program was established in September 1975, to honor the Nobel Laureate and the first Director of Research and Development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The appointment of Eugene P. Wigner Fellows to the laboratory staff provides an opportunity for outstanding life, physical, computer, and computation, and social scientists and engineers and applied scientists to select and pursue research in an area related to national energy problems and interests.

The Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology, created by the National Science Foundation in 2003, is an Engineering Research Center that is exploring the development of compact coherent extreme ultraviolet sources and their applications in challenging scientific and technological problems. The center’s goal is to make extreme ultraviolet light available routinely in a broad variety of laboratory settings. The center has three core partner institutions including University of Colorado at Boulder, University of California at Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

For more information about the Wigner Fellowship Program or Oak Ridge National Laboratory, go to http://www.ornl.gov/adm/wigner_fellowship/index.htm. For more information about The Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology, go to http://euverc.colostate.edu/.

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