OSU Associate Professor of Physics Eric Benton recently established the Radiation Physics Education and Research Fund with a $500,000 gift from an anonymous donor.
The Fund, administered through the OSU Foundation, will be used to support both graduate and undergraduate students working in Benton's laboratory. Research in the Benton Radiation Physics Laboratory focuses on understanding how ionizing radiation interacts with matter, including living tissue, and on the development of low cost radiation detectors to measure human exposure to radiation and characterize ionizing radiation environments, especially those encountered in space and the atmosphere. The fund also supports Benton's "museum" of scientific instruments, demonstration apparatus and other curiosities used in teaching physics. The fund has already been put to good use, supporting the travel of OSU Physics Graduate Students Bryan Hayes and Paul Inman to Los Alamos National Laboratory to carry out experiments at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center.