The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $1.25 million Physics Investigators Initiative grant to Justin C. Burton, an associate professor of physics at Emory University. The grant will cover the next five years of Burton’s investigation in advancing the scientific frontier in experimental physics.
Burton’s investigative research works to bridge the communication gap between geoscientists and soft matter experimentalists, who currently use different terminology to describe the same phenomena.
“This award is about new directions. It will allow our lab to investigate problems at the interface of physics and geoscience, problems with a direct impact on climate change,” says Burton.
Burton’s research on geoscience and soft matter is expected to have immense impact and open new avenues of experimental soft matter physics for adapting to a changing climate.
His group’s experiments aim to capture fundamental features of geophysical soft matter in the laboratory. They investigate the slow creep of materials such as glacial ice, the failure of granular materials and debris flows and the interactions of levitated dust particles in the atmosphere.
For more information, read the full story at Emory News.