NE graduate Bethany Lyles, has been awarded a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley (September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2010). She has the added distinction of being designated a Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Fellow which recognizes exceptional women in the sciences. Prof. Jasmina Vujic will serve as her academic mentor during her postdoctoral residency.

Dr. Lyles' research interests lie in nuclear physics, in particular, in the energy level structure of exotic nuclei or nuclei far from stability. She graduated top in her class with a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Chemistry from Fort Lewis College. Before beginning graduate school at Berkeley, Lyles spent a year at the MIT working on a joint project with the NASA Glenn Research Center exploring the behavior of magnetorheological fluids in microgravity.  While at Berkeley, she participated in "Public Policy and Nuclear Threats: Training the Next Generation", an NSF-sponsored Ph.D. training program for students throughout the UC system which began its collaborations in July 2003 on both technical and policy issues surrounding nuclear threats and international security. She finished her dissertation in December, 2007 and immediately began work as a postdoctoral researcher with DoNuTS, the Domestic Nuclear Threat Security research project, to improve domestic security by developing better methods of detecting nuclear material.