[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 114 (Tuesday, July 21, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1092]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  RECOGNIZING THE WORK OF DR. MEI BAI FOR HER ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN THE 
                        FIELD OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. LEE M. ZELDIN

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 21, 2015

  Mr. ZELDIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Doctor Mei 
Bai, whose innovation and leadership at the Department of Energy's 
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, in my 
district, has greatly impacted the field of nuclear physics. This month 
she receives the E.O. Lawrence Award, a prestigious award bestowed by 
the Department of Energy for exceptional scientific achievement.
  Dr. Bai joined Brookhaven National Lab in 1999 as a research 
associate in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Accelerator 
Physics Group, was promoted to Associate Scientist in 2001, and to 
Scientist in 2004. In 2000, she was the recipient of the American 
Physical Society's Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Beam Physics 
Award. In 2010, the Asian Committee for Future Accelerators and the 
organizing committee of the 2010 First International Particle 
Accelerator Conference awarded Bai a prize for her significant and 
original contributions to the field of accelerator research. Dr. Bai 
recently joined the Nuclear Physics Institute in Germany, which 
conducts experimental and theoretical basic research in the areas of 
nuclear, hadron, and particle physics.
  In the 1990s, Dr. Bai and her colleagues devised a way to keep 
protons circulating in an accelerator polarized, or all spinning in the 
same directions on their axes. This was a crucial development which was 
successfully demonstrated at Brookhaven National Laboratory's 
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, which is an accelerator that is a key 
part of the RHIC complex.
  This week, Dr. Mei Bai is being honored with an E.O. Lawrence award 
for her outstanding research, which has allowed for the first direct 
measurement of the contributions of fundamental particles known as 
quarks and gluons to the spin of the proton.
  Physicists from around the world study polarized protons at RHIC to 
determine the answer to a fundamental question--how protons get their 
spin, an intrinsic property of the particle that is not completely 
understood. Dr. Bai's work enabled RHIC researchers to successfully 
accelerate individual beams of polarized protons to 255 billion 
electron volts of energy. The beams were collided at a total mass 
energy of 510 billion electron volts, making RHIC the world's first and 
only high energy polarized proton collider.
  Today, I thank her for her enthusiasm and the inspiration she 
provides to other scientists at Brookhaven National Lab and the 
international community. I congratulate Dr. Bai on her accomplishments 
and this very significant award.

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