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DOE Physicists at
Work
Profiles of
representative DOE-sponsored physicists
doing
research at universities and national
laboratories
Compiled by the Office of Scientific and
Technical Information
Winston
Roberts
What holds a nucleus together?
That question, asked by his high school chemistry
teacher, inspired a young Winston Roberts to an eventual
career in physics as a full professor at Old Dominion
University and a member of the Theory
Group at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National
Accelerator Laboratory (JLab).
"My late high school chemistry
teacher, E. Norman Lambert, is the one who got me
interested in this kind of question," said Dr. Roberts,
who was born in Port of Spain on the island of
Trinidad. While attending high school at the
Queen's Royal College, one of the island's most renowned
high schools, Dr. Roberts decided to major in physics
for his undergraduate studies, which were pursued at
Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. This
was made possible through a scholarship from the
government of Trinidad and Tobago. "The
scholarship was a wonderful opportunity, as I would
never have been able to afford this," said Dr.
Roberts.
In his graduating year at Dalhousie,
Dr. Roberts received the University Medal for finishing
atop the physics graduating class, along with the
Governor General's Gold Medal. He then went to
Guelph, Ontario, about 90 minutes from Toronto, for his
Ph. D. His first year at Guelph was spent at
Oxford University. Dr. Roberts completed his Ph.
D. in 1988 with Dr. Gabriel Karl, then spent one year as
a research associate in Grenoble, France, followed by
about 18 months at Harvard University. "By this
time, I was a permanent resident of Canada, and had
received an NSERC Fellowship that would allow me to
conduct research anywhere in the world," said Dr.
Roberts. Since his appointment at Old Dominion
University, he has also been awarded a "National Young
Investigator" award by the National Science
Foundation. "That award allowed me a lot of
independence, as I could design my research program as I
thought appropriate," said Dr. Roberts.
Dr. Roberts' research focuses on
what is known as "hadronic physics" and, not
surprisingly, is related to the heart of that question
asked so many years ago in Trinidad - the
nucleus.
"Basically, I'm trying to understand
the way in which quarks make up the proton and neutron,
and all of their relatives, and how these particles
behave," said Dr. Roberts. "Some of my projects
are directly related to the mission of JLab and the DOE,
such as calculations for processes that will be measured
there. DOE's Office
of Nuclear Physics provides support for "the
community of scientists who seek to understand the
fundamental forces and particles of nature as manifested
in nuclear matter.
"So has the question that brought
Dr. Roberts into his field of research - What holds a
nucleus together? - been answered?
"We now have a good idea of what
holds the nucleus together, but there are many details
we're still trying to understand. In my current
research, I am looking at things one layer deeper,
exploring how the proton and neutron (the particles that
make up all the matter that most of us ever 'see') are
made out of quarks," said Dr. Roberts.
Dr. Roberts currently receives
funding from the DOE through his position at JLab, and
he understands funding questions from the point of view
of the funding agencies as well. He has served as
a program officer at the National Science Foundation and
is currently on leave in the Office of Nuclear Physics
at the Department of Energy, helping to make funding
decisions in nuclear theory.
In addition to his scientific and
administrative endeavors, Dr. Roberts is an avid
woodworker, with a preference for working with exotic
woods. Some of his creations can be seen on his
website at http://www.knottyprofessor.com/.
Dr.
Roberts' home page
Dr. Roberts articles accessed via
OSTI:
Information
Bridge
A
Model for Two-Pion Photoproduction Amplitudes
Heavy
Quark Effective
Theory
Energy
Citations Database
Color-Singlet
Quark-Pair Transmutation: Helicity Amplitudes
and Partial-Wave Analysis
String-Breaking
Model for  Production
Baryon-Antibaryon
Decays of Four-Quark States
Can
Four-Quark States Be Easily Detected in
Baryon-Antibaryon Scattering?
Simple
Tests of the Factorization Assumption
Heavy
Quark Symmetries and the Decays B 
Baryon+Antibaryon
 decays of baryons in a relativized
model
Heavy
mass expansion in  decaysQuasi-two-body
decays of nonstrange baryons
Relativistic
Chiral Quark Model for Pseudoscalar Emission From
Heavy Mesons
r
polarization and model independent extraction of |Vub|/|Vcd|
from D  and B E-print
Network
A
Phenomenological Lagrangian Approach to Two Kaon
Photoproduction and Pentaquark Searches
Polarization
Observables in 
Polarization
Observables for Two-Pion Production off the
Nucleon
A Vision for
Nuclear Theory: Report to NSAC
Radiative
Transitions in Heavy Mesons in a Relativistic Quark
Model
Quark Models
of Baryon Masses and Decays
Phenomenological
Study of Strong Decays of Heavy Hadrons in Heavy Quark
Effective Theory
Evidence for
the Fourth P11 Resonance Predicted by the
Constituent Quark Model
A Relativistic
Chiral Quark Model for Pseudoscalar Emission From
Heavy Mesons
Strange Decays
of Nonstrange Baryons
Strong Decays
of Heavy Hadrons In HQET
A Model For
Two-Pion Photoproduction Amplitudes
Meson Decays In
A Quark Model
New Baryons in
the  and  Channels
HQET and Form
Factor Effects in 
Application of
HQET to  Transitions
Heavy Mesons In
A Relativistic Model
Soft Pion
Emission in Semileptonic B-Meson
Decays
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