Joseph A. Vanfossen, Jr.

Dr. Vanfossen earned his Ph.D. from Kent State University in 2017.  Afterwards, he took a position as an upper school science teacher at Davidson Day School in Davidson, NC where he taught physics to high school students.  When the opportunity to return home to Tuscarawas County arose, he could not resist and accepted his current position at Kent State University Tuscarawas in Fall 2018.  It had always been long term goal to return home and work to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and problem solvers originating from our community.

His research interests are in high energy experimental nuclear physics.  He is a member of the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) Collaboration.  STAR is one of the currently active experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York.  At the RHIC facility atoms have their electrons stripped off leaving bare nuclei that are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and collided together.  The material produced in these collisions called 'Quark Gluon Plasma' (QGP) last existed naturally microseconds after the Big Bang.  During these collisions nuclear matter is compressed to extremely high density and heated to extremely high temperatures (trillions of degrees) producing a large number of particles that have their tracks and other pertinent data recorded.  These data are then reconstructed and analyzed to gain insight and understanding into the processes, behavior, and phenomenology of the QGP.  In particular he is ineterested in 'heavy flavor' physics which is the study of particles that contain at least one quark that is a charm or heavier quark.  Dr. Vanfossen's Ph.D. work, completed under the advisement of Dr. Spiros Margetis, incorporated the use machine learning techniques in an attempt to analyze data to perform a direct topological reconstruction of one of these heavy flavor particles, the D⁰ meson consisting of a charm quark and and up quark.

Outside of work, you will find Dr. Vanfossen spending time with his family, fishing, and building custom fishing rods.