Jobs, family ‘matter’ to Grau

From the Pontiac Daily Leader: Jobs, family ‘matter’ to Grau

Pontiac, Ill. — For Nathan Grau, a 1996 Flanagan High School graduate, who starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat many summers ago, “Any Dream Will Not Do.”

Grau is an assistant professor of physics at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D. He is the son of Mary Jo Heath and Gary Grau.

In high school, he read the book, “The God Particle" by Leon Lederman, then the director of Fermi National Laboratory outside of Chicago. Lederman did his Nobel Prize winning work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., and after reading his book, Grau knew this is what he wanted to be doing. “Amazingly and somewhat miraculously,” Grau has achieved his goal.

Grau graduated from Millikin University with a bachelor of science degree in physics and minor degrees in astronomy and mathematics. From there he went to Iowa State to work on his doctorate in physics. As a PhD student he studied with the experimental nuclear physics group working on the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiement (PHENIX), a collaboration of 500 scientists and engineers from around the world.

“This collaboration built and continues to maintain a three-story tall, 200-ton detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced “Rick”) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. RHIC is a particle accelerator that takes beams of particles, accelerates them to almost the speed of light, and steers them into collision. When RHIC collides gold beams, thousands of particles are produced. The PHENIX detector acts like a giant digital camera which images those particles coming out of the collision. Scientists then use those particles to recreate what happened when the gold collided,” said Grau.

Why is this interesting to us? “When those gold beams collide, a new state of hot and dense matter is formed and is how the universe looked one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. These are extremely short-lived little bursts. The 1 trillion degree region expands and cools after ten-thousands of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Scientists at PHENIX, in essence, study the infant universe.”

After graduating with a PhD in nuclear physics in 2005, Grau moved on to continue his education and apply his trade. He took a job as a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University in New York City. There he continued to work on the PHENIX experiment. He also became a member of the ATLAS collaboration, the collaboration that maintains one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, the particle accelerator made famous in Dan Brown's "Angles and Demons," he said.

At Columbia, Grau continued his work studying the early universe at both PHENIX and ATLAS. He played an important role in a project which produced the first major physics result from the Large Hadron Collider. In a paper Grau submitted last November, he strikingly confirmed “that the early universe is a dense liquid rather than a gas as people generally expected,” he said.

“What we learned early on in the experiment is that we saw high energy particles soaked up by the soup that is the universe a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. Basically (with ATLAS), we can ask more detailed questions that we can answer,” Grau said.

That’s right, the first millionth of a second of the Big Bang was more like a log flume ride than a gun blowing up a balloon and popping carnival game analogy. At least, according to the data Grau has presented.

And what are the ramifications for the common man? While Grau admits that the basic science doesn't have any direct impact on our daily lives. There are a number of indirect consequences of this work. The detectors “push the limits of engineering. The things we have learned have helped us make better, more accurate, PET and MRI detectors.”

“Scientists also push the limit of computing technology. PHENIX produces 1 petabyte, that's 1,000 gigabytes, of data per year that we have to share with colleagues around the world. Things like distributed computing, which are buzz words now, were being dreamed up 15 years ago by these experiments. Not to mention, the World Wide Web was developed by scientists to share data,” Grau added.

The fourth job Grau holds is his greatest love — teaching upper division courses for physics majors, introductory-level general education courses and even a computer science course. “During the summer months I only had one class to teach and had money to pay a student to do research with me. So, I was spending time analyzing data predominately. During the school year, I teach two and half classes.”

“The preparation for a college course is extensive and this is only my second year of teaching full-time, so I spend a lot of time preparing lectures, demonstrations, assignments, exams, grading and helping out students who are stuck, etc.,” he said.

Grau said he also loved talking to students of any age about science. “It is crucial to get the young people interested in science.”

Grau hates to admit it, but sometimes his job as a husband and dad takes a back seat to his other four jobs. He has a wife, Nikki, and two children, Brandon, 6, and Sadie, 4. He enjoys camping with his son and in his spare time, he likes to read the novels of John Grisham and watch sports on TV.

Grau says he loves his jobs. “I love learning new things. I can do this through my research in physics and through the teaching and interacting I do with other students.”

The aspect he enjoys most is the travel. “I have been to three continents and around a dozen countries, mostly in Europe. I have also been in China and India. This has put me in touch with a number of foreign nationals with opportunity to learn other cultures from my colleagues,” Grau said.

Grau thinks he is a good fit for these jobs because he is people friendly. “I believe very strongly that a good scientist needs to be able to not only discuss things with their peers, but also relate science information to everyone.

“Sometimes I enjoy my work so much, I get lost," he continued. "I forget to sleep. Sleep is erratic. I just love my job.”

When asked about what faith-based people might say about his research, Grau replied, “Religion and science are all searching after the same thing. We just might come at it from slightly different viewpoints. My opinion is not to take the Bible literally. It was not intended to be absolute. It was written to show God’s love. Everyone has a right to their opinion. I can respect any opinion.

“Actually, Augustana (in Sioux Falls, S.D.) is refreshingly open in their discussions. Students are free to ask tough questions,” he said. He added that Augustana is an Evangelical Lutheran Church of America College.

If Grau was teaching students in Flanagan, he would say, “Work hard. That’s my biggest asset.”

His mom, Mary Jo Heath, echoes that remark.”I am so proud of him because he has done all the work himself. He is such a hard worker and really has stick-to-it-ism.

“When he was 2, I showed him the Big Dipper. Then when he was in Tiger Cubs, he went to the Planetarium. Then we bought him telescopes and things. I always thought he would be a teacher and author papers. I guess with his research he does that,” she said.

Grau’s father thinks he works hard also. “I am very proud of Nathan. I have followed his career from Millikin to his thesis defense at Iowa State even to Prague in the Czech Republic. I think when he was younger, he was more interested in math — in college at Iowa State, his professor kind of took him under his wing and steered him into physics.”

When asked if he would have rather have grown up in a big city rather than Flanagan, he replied, “It is mixed. I first became interested in science by spending hours outside on the farm looking at the stars. I could not have done that in a big city. Life is slow in the small towns and so I had plenty of time to ponder and wonder and think. The advantage of a larger city would have been a little more opportunity of advanced schooling. Looking back, I was more prepared to take more advanced courses in science and math than was available in Flanagan, but I made up for it in college and graduate school.”

In 10 years from now, Grau hopes to still be teaching at Augustana or another liberal arts college in the United States. “I want to work for a college that values professors who are doing research with the students rather than just classroom learning. With science, this is difficult. The fiscal state of the union is quite uncertain. The funding for basic science comes nearly exclusively from the federal government.”

“There are plans to upgrade detectors at Brookhaven and run the facility beyond 2020. There is an exciting opportunity here in South Dakota where the plan is to build a new facility in the abandoned Homestake mine near Rapid City to study things called neutrinos and dark matter. Over 75 percent of the matter of the world is dark matter and we have no idea what it is composed of. People are trying to find out what it is, but it is elusive.

“In science, we celebrate what we don’t understand and we continue to poke the things that we think we understand,” Grau said.

Grau is not just living the dream; he is living his dream.