Megan Connors, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University, has been elected co-spokesperson of a major international physics experiment designed to uncover new clues about how the universe began.
Connors is helping to lead sPHENIX, a large scientific collaboration based at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. She shares the role with Jin Huang, a tenured physicist at Brookhaven.
“It’s an honor to be elected by fellow scientists I’ve worked with for many years,” Connors said. “This role gives me a chance to help shape the future of a project that could deepen our understanding of the smallest building blocks of nature and the early universe.”
The project aims to explore the extreme conditions of the early universe by using high-energy collisions that allow researchers to study exotic forms of matter.
“By colliding heavy ions at speeds close to the speed of light, we create a system with high enough temperature and density to ‘melt’ normal nuclear matter and reproduce the quark-gluon plasma, which is what the early universe was just moments after the Big Bang,” Connors said.
As co-spokesperson, Connors plays a central role in shaping the collaboration’s research efforts. She helps manage the approval of scientific results, coordinates with other project leaders and serves as the main point of contact with the U.S. Department of Energy.
Connors is also making sure Georgia State students have a seat at the table. Several students have contributed to building and testing key components of the sPHENIX detector, which is the foundation of some of the students’ Ph.D. dissertations.
“Working on this project gives our students real-world experience in frontier physics,” Connors said. “It’s a chance to be part of something global — something that’s shaping the future of nuclear physics.”
For Muhammad Elsayed, a Ph.D. candidate in physics, the opportunity has been both scientific and personal.
“I’ve gained a lot of experience, not just in experimental nuclear physics, but in how people from different backgrounds can come together to pursue a shared goal,” Elsayed said. “It’s inspiring to contribute to one of the biggest questions in physics today.”
This year, sPHENIX began collecting data from gold-on-gold collisions, enabling researchers to analyze how different types of particles move through the plasma.
“I’m most excited about comparing how various particles interact with the plasma,” Connors said. “That can tell us a lot about how matter behaved at the dawn of time.”
Connors has worked in nuclear physics for more than a decade. She earned her doctorate from Stony Brook University in New York and previously contributed to major experiments at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
She says she’s proud to represent Georgia State on the international stage.
“There are only a handful of facilities in the world where this kind of research is possible,” she said. “For our department, and our students, to help lead it is something special.”
