Kutztown U Alumna Receives the 2021 LeRoy Apker Award

KUTZTOWN, Pa. – (October 26, 2021) – Kutztown University alumna Caelan Brooks ’21 was named the 2021 recipient of the American Physical Society’s LeRoy Apker Award “for the discovery of distinct dynamical regimes for coherent ultracold atoms confined in a ring-shaped lattice potential; and for developing a statistical model that depicts the formation of phenotypic patterns associated with bacterial biofilm growth.”

The American Physical Society is the world’s premier organization for physics. The LeRoy Apker Award recognizes outstanding achievements in physics by undergraduate students, and provides encouragement to students who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment.  Wikipedia describes this award as “…the highest honor awarded to undergraduate physicists in the United States.”

According to Dr. Kunal K. Das, professor of physics at KU, “The selection process is highly competitive, and the assessment done by some of the leading scientists in the world. This year, the committee was chaired by a famous Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Only two awards are made every year in the country, and this is the first time a PASSHE student has been awarded this honor.”

Brooks graduated summa cum laude from Kutztown University in just three years, earning a B.S. in physics and minors in mathematics and Spanish. She worked with Das on ultra-cold atoms trapped in ring-shaped lattices, demonstrating the existence of two distinct dynamical regimes with continuous transition possible via rotation. She and Das further examined the quantum states of lattices with cylindrical topology in the context of synthetic gauge fields and explained gauge-sensitive features that emerge due to the periodic boundary condition.

Through an REU program at Boston University, Brooks also investigated the emergence of unique phenotypic patterns in Bacillus subtilis bacterial biofilms. With Prof. Joseph Larkin of BU and Prof. Andrew Mugler of the University of Pittsburgh, she created a model for the underlying intercellular interactions that describe the emergence of macroscopic fractal-like patterns seen in experiments.

Brooks is the first author on three papers tied to her work and is the recipient of the Chambliss Gold Medal, the KU Sesquicentennial Academic Honors Scholarship, and the Syed R. Ali-Zaidi award cited by the Pennsylvania State Congress.

During her time at Kutztown University, she maintained a perfect GPA, was a member of the nationally-ranked KU women’s soccer team, and served on the executive board of the local Society of Physics Students (SPS) chapter.  She is a native of Bear, Del., and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University.