To Physics professor and department chair John Price, who serves as CSUDH Professor and Chair of the Physics Department, his endeavors in the field of experimental nuclear physics mirror that of the creation of a handy construction kit guide.
“Say you go to Ikea, and you get a book shelf and it comes inside of a big flat box, and you open it up and it’s got big pieces of wood, an allen wrench, and a booklet with little pictograms showing you how to put your bookshelf together,” said Price. “I’m the guy who writes that book.”
Aside from running the day-to-day operations of the department and instructing students, Price conducts research in experimental nuclear physics at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility – a particle physics lab located in Newport News, Virginia.
“This [particle accelerator] allows us to produce many processes very quickly because we are sending many beam particles at it,” Price said. “It has a high luminosity which is effectively how many events can happen, very quickly. We take data, something like 10,000 times per second.”
The amount of data amassed through the process daily is approximately 10 terabytes, which is equivalent to the amount of content inside a modern public library. Price then brings a subset of that data to the supercomputer system on campus where students help to analyze it.
Price’s two-decades-long research and analysis of atomic nuclei won him the 2023 Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Award from the Office of Faculty Affairs, which recognizes work done by faculty in their field that is an, “essential component of the university’s mission and that stimulates student learning.”
But this barely scratches the surface of awards and grants that Price has received over the course of his academic career.
“My research has been funded by the US Department of Energy almost continuously since 2007,” Price explained. “Shortly after I came to campus, I got a grant from the Katrell Research Corporation, which is a place where new faculty in the STEM fields often go.”
This grant gave Price enough of a foothold in the system to where the Department of Energy began monitoring his research work and liked his results, which prompted them to begin sending funding over for this current project.
Price was also awarded the Minor Capital Outlay grant by the campus, which allowed him to better supply the electrical power output of the supercomputer laboratory on campus.
“The campus put in a lot of money to refurbish my lab,” Price said. “The lab is a big room that has a bunch of computers … Most of the rooms on campus don’t have 48 electrical outlets to plug in computers, so once you begin adding in the outlets for the monitors and outlets for anything else, it begins to get complicated.”
The Physics Department at Dominguez Hills is one of the fastest growing on campus, according to Price. He served as chair of the department from 2010 to 2018, overseeing the influx of physics programs offered. The department only had 15 majors at the time, but by the end of Price’s tenure as chair, it had increased to 65.
“We grew by more than a factor of four and there are no other departments on campus that existed then that could say that,” said Price. “We are poised to grow again with our new systems engineering program and our biophysics program and changes we are making in the department in general that we are hopeful will continue that growth in the future.”
Price took a semester off in 2019, but returned to campus the next semester as interim dean of graduate studies and research. Price has returned to his faculty position as professor and chair of the Physics department this past May.
“Everyday is different. You have people who come in and think they are going to be doing the same thing everyday,” Price said.“That’s not what happens here, there’s always new problems to solve.”
