Jeong honored with Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Association of Korean Physicists in America

Donghui Jeong, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics, has been honored with the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Association of Korean Physicists in America. Given annually since 1994, the award recognizes young Korean physicists working in North America who have the potential for making creative and substantive advances in their subfield of physics and achieving professional success as a physicist. The award was presented during the Forum on International Physics reception at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 2015.

Jeong is a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist interested in broad questions about the beginning of the universe. He uses large-scale observations, such as the distribution of high-redshift galaxies that are quickly moving further away from Earth, to understand inflation at the beginning of the universe, the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, the mass of subatomic particles like neutrinos, and whether the general theory of relativity is valid on large scales and at early times.

Jeong has published over 40 scientific papers in journals such as Classical and Quantum Gravity, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Astrophysical Journal. He has presented his research in talks across the United States and around the world in places including Korea, Mexico, Russia, and Germany. Jeong's previous awards and honors include the Wendell Gordon Endowed University Fellowship and the Frank N. Edmonds Memorial Fellowship in 2008 and the David Benfield Memorial Scholarship in Astronomy in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Before joining Penn State, Jeong was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysical Science at Johns Hopkins University from 2011 to 2014 and a Robinson Postdoctoral Scholar in theoretical cosmology at the California Institute of Technology from 2010 to 2011. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and a doctoral degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010.