Thomas Blum, professor of physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), has received a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, one of Germany’s most prestigious honors for internationally recognized researchers.

The foundation grants the award to up to 100 scholars each year in recognition of their academic careers. Recipients are nominated by established researchers at German institutions. They are selected based on discoveries, new theories, or findings that have had a lasting impact on their fields, as well as their potential to continue producing outstanding research.

“The Humboldt Research Award is a highly prestigious and selective honor, awarded to the top scientists from around the world to promote collaborative projects with German scholars,” says Barrett Wells, CLAS associate dean for physical sciences and graduate affairs and professor of physics. “This recognition speaks to the impact and international reach of Tom’s leadership in theoretical, high-energy physics.”

“I take it as a great honor to receive this recognition for the research that I’ve done throughout my career,” says Blum.

The award provides recipients with 80,000 euros and the opportunity to carry out research projects with collaborators in Germany. For Blum, it will support a sabbatical during the 2026-2027 academic year at the University of Regensburg, where he will work with physicist Christoph Lehner, who nominated him for the award.

Blum is a particle theorist who studies the fundamental interactions of nature. His work focuses on the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which describes the strong force, or interaction, that binds quarks and gluons together to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.

“They’re the most elementary strongly interacting particles that we know of, and in order to study those interactions, we need to perform very large-scale numerical simulations,” says Blum. “That’s what I’ll be doing with my colleagues in Germany.”

Blum is widely known in the field for advancing the computational tools physicists use to tackle some of the discipline’s most difficult problems. With his collaborator Amarjit Soni at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he was the first to use an important formulation for quarks that captures a key symmetry of nature, which is now commonly used in numerical QCD calculations that rely on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Blum was also the first to carry out a key calculation that helped reduce the uncertainty in the muon’s magnetic moment, a fundamental quantity used to test the Standard Model of particle physics with unprecedented precision. The muon is an elementary particle similar to the ordinary electron, but heavier.

Both Blum and Lehner are members of the RBC Collaboration, an international group of researchers that uses lattice QCD, a computational method for studying quarks and gluons by modeling space-time as a four-dimensional grid. Blum joined the collaboration while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory before coming to UConn. He plans to use his time in Germany to deepen those research connections.

“One of the most exciting aspects of being a department head is getting to know, in much more detail, what all my colleagues are doing,” says George Gibson, professor and head of the Department of Physics. “I have come to understand and appreciate the depths of Prof. Blum’s contributions to a fundamental problem in quantum chromodynamics. Receiving the Humboldt Award is well-deserved!”