BIO

Ejiro Umaka is a physicist and postdoctoral research associate, who joined Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2022. There, she analyzes data from the sPHENIX experiment to characterize the quark-gluon-plasma — a freely flowing liquid of subatomic particles produced at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility for nuclear physics research. Before arriving at Brookhaven, Umaka collaborated on sPHENIX and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider as a postdoc at Iowa State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2020.

ABSTRACT

Microseconds after the Big Bang, nothing was as we see it now. Today, scientists are re-creating the quark-gluon plasma that filled the early universe and formed its basic building blocks. My research studies this plasma to better understand, at a fundamental level, why the natural world works the way it does. I rely on a detector named sPHENIX and probes called jets — sprays of high-momentum particles — to identify the plasma’s unique properties and prepare for future explorations into the heart of nearly everything we see in the universe.