FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Raymond Walter, a doctoral student in physics and mathematics, is the first student from the University of Arkansas selected for a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Research Award. 

The award program will provide Walter a $3,000 monthly stipend for up to one year and a $2,000 travel allowance. The program gives doctoral candidates an opportunity to conduct a significant part of their doctoral dissertation research in collaboration with scientists at a Department of Energy national laboratory. Awardees are selected on the basis of a submitted research proposal aligned with one of the Office of Science Priority Research areas.

Walter will collaborate with Lin-Wang Wang, senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. His appointment begins Nov. 1 and will last one year. He was among 43 awardees from 31 different universities in the program’s latest round of funding. The program began in 2014.

Walter is conducting physics research as part of the Computational Condensed Matter Physics Group at the U of A. His focus in the Computational Material Science and Nanoscience Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be electronic properties of topological defects and other complex geometries in ferroelectric materials. His calculations will be performed on supercomputers in the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.

Walter is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a U of A Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in physics and mathematics. His dissertation adviser is Laurent Bellaiche, Distinguished Professor of physics.