Dr. Paul Sorensen
Dr. Paul Sorensen has served as a program manager for the Fundamental Symmetries subprogram within the Office of Nuclear Physics (NP) since 2016. He currently also serves as the program manager for NP’s RENEW program. In 2020, Dr. Sorensen led the establishment the program Research Traineeships to Broaden and Diversify Nuclear Physics. This program, a precursor to NP-RENEW, pursues the goal of erasing underrepresentation among Nuclear Physics Ph.D. graduates within a decade. Prior to joining DOE, Dr. Sorensen worked as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, earning several awards for his research at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the George E. Valley Prize from the American Physical Society. Dr. Sorensen’s research has focused on the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon-plasma which permeated the early universe up until a few microseconds after the big bang.
Dr. Sorensen received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003 where his thesis won the RHIC and AGS Thesis Award. Dr. Sorensen served on the steering committee for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science from 2013 to 2016 and has appeared in science cafés, interviews (e.g., Science Friday), videos, documentaries (e.g., Science Channel’s Strip the Cosmos: Hunt for the Big Bang), and science fairs (e.g., World Science Festival).
