The American Elementary Particle Physicist Dr. William Shepherd is one of six winners of the 2016 Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will establish a junior research group at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) to further develop models, methods, and instruments for research in the search for dark matter. Shepherd obtained a doctoral degree from the University of California, Irvine, in 2011 and most recently worked at the Niels Bohr International Academy at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. At JGU, he will join the Theoretical High Energy Physics (THEP) work group led by Prof. Dr. Matthias Neubert. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is supporting Dr. William Shepherd’s research project with up to 1.65 million euros over the next five years.

The Sofja Kovalevskaja Award is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It is one of the most highly endowed German science awards and enables the award-winning researchers to carry out academic papers under unique conditions: For five years, they can – independently and without administrative constraints – carry out their own research project at an institute of their choice in Germany and set up their own work group. The award recognizes the scientific excellence of particularly promising young researchers from abroad. The award ceremony for the six international research talents who will be awarded this year’s Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize will take place in Berlin on November 15, 2016.

Dark matter is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Laboratory experiments have not been able to detect it, nor do detectors respond to it. It makes itself felt indirectly, for example by influencing the formation of structures in the early universe. Researchers estimate that there is more than five times as much dark matter as we are familiar with. At the particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), experiments are underway to discover new particles and get to the bottom of dark matter. Particle Physics scientist Dr. William Shepherd is developing efficient methods to analyze the masses of data generated in this process. He is also developing theoretical models that make it possible to combine the results from a wide range of experimental methods and sources and decipher their internal relationships.

At Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Prof. Dr. Matthias Neubert has been conducting intensive research in the field of theoretical physics on fundamental interactions and the properties of elementary particles for many years. Neubert himself received an ERC Advanced Grant of EUR 2.1 million in 2011 to investigate fundamental questions in physics on the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking and the property of elementary particles known as flavor, with the aim of contributing to a fundamental understanding of the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. “Dr. William Shepherd’s research offers a novel approach to bringing together the world’s dark matter searches into a coherent picture. He focuses on the data obtained at the LHC at CERN, but combines it with observations at much lower energies. This combination could be the key to researching dark matter,” emphasizes Neubert.

The work of Sofja Kovalevskaja prizewinner Dr. William Shepherd is also integrated into the Mainz Cluster of Excellence “Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter” (PRISMA), which is being funded with around 35 million euros in the current Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments.