Julia Velkovska

Julia Apostolova Velkovska is a Bulgarian-American high energy particle physicist who is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. Her research considers nuclear matter in the extreme conditions generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. She hopes that this work will help to explain the mechanisms that underpin the strong force.

Early life and education Velkovska was born in Bulgaria. She attended Sofia University, where she majored in physics. After earning her bachelor's degree in 1988, Velkovska joined Stony Brook University for her doctoral research. She remained at Stony Brook for a short postdoctoral position, before moving to Brookhaven National Laboratory as an assistant scientist. She showed that in these extreme environments, matter exists in a novel phase, with an unexpected increase in the number of protons and anti-protons. The phase, the quark–gluon plasma, is expected to be the most hot and dense, and believed to have existed in the first microseconds of the universe. She has investigated how particles interact with the quark–gluon plasma as part of the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (PHENIX). After the identification of the quark–gluon plasma, Velkovska worked on improving the detectors of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The most surprising result was that this quark-gluon plasma behaved like a highly coordinated liquid, not a gas.

In 2018, Velkovska showed that these collisions result in small droplets of almost perfect fluid, i.e. a cohesive liquid that flows at zero viscosity, that emerge in distinctive patterns, including ellipses and triangles. 2007 Sloan Research Fellowship 2015 American Physical Society Fellow 2016 Vanderbilt University Chancellor's Award for Research 2019 Vanderbilt University Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair 2023 Vanderbilt University Physics and Astronomy Department Chair

Selected publications