PHILADELPHIA – Christopher Lester, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is among 150 recipients of a new U.S. Energy Department Graduate Fellowship to encourage students to pursue careers in science, mathematics and engineering.

Lester, from Marietta, Ga., studies fundamental particles and their interactions in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. He has been involved in high-energy hadron collider physics in searching for rare interactions in the electroweak sector that involve multiple gauge bosons, Ws Zs and Photons.  He currently is working on a project at the Collider Detector at Fermilab investigating new methods for using the tau decay channel in searches for the Standard Model and Super-symmetric Higgs boson.  He is also working on commissioning the TRT detector at ATLAS.

The program is part of an initiative to strengthen the scientific workforce by providing financial support to young scholars during the formative years of their research.

Each graduate fellow will receive $50,500 per year for as long as three years to support tuition, living expenses, research materials and travel to research conferences or to Energy Department science facilities.     

The fellowships are funded in part from $12.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

A complete list of Fellowship Program recipients is available at http://science.energy.gov/scgf.