Gyang Chung: What makes a particle, makes a physicist

The following story was written in May 2025 by Mary Conner in ​ENGL ​4824​: Science Writing ​as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

    Physicists are complex, much like the particles they study. Each physicist has their own background that has shaped their values and goals. Gyang Chung is no different. His ideals are clearly sculpted by his experiences and the challenges he has faced throughout his life thus far. Just like the particles he studies, there is much more to Chung than what is visible to the naked eye — one just needs to take a closer look.

    Chung has always had a natural inclination towards the sciences, excelling in his mathematical and scientific courses throughout his early education. It wasn’t until high school that he learned about the atomic nucleus, setting him on the course to pursue physics.

    Today, Chung gets to research what inspired him to begin his physics journey — the elementary particles that make up the nucleus of the atom. If you aren’t a physicist, you might remember from your school days that an atom consists of electrons surrounding a nucleus, which is made up of protons and neutrons — both also referred to as nucleons.

    One of Chung’s goals is to understand the inner structure of the nucleon from its elementary building blocks, the smallest known particles, also called quarks and gluons. He is studying physics reactions that are sensitive to the position and the momentum of the quarks, enabling him to establish a 3-dimensional map of the nucleon’s structure. At the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Lab in Newport News, Virginia, he studies high energy particle collisions in which decay products from the reaction provide information on the quark’s distributions. With those constraints understood, Chung is contributing to creating a tomographic image of the nucleon — a visible scale rendering of this tiny object.

    His eyes aren’t only set inwards on elementary particles, but also outwards on the future applications of his research. These application possibilities inspire Chung’s work the most. He feels his work is important to the field of particle physics because it has the chance to illuminate the current prevailing theories in the field, namely in demonstrating whether the distributions of quarks in a nucleon are universal quantities. The ability to disprove or validate these hypotheses, he says, is crucial to the advancement of physics.

    “To be able to constrain some of these hypotheses that have been made on the structure of the nucleon is rewarding to the field of particle physics,” he explains, “because without validation, the field will not grow.”

    Chung says physics can be fun and challenging at the same time. Although some people can be scared of physics due to its challenging nature, he thinks that staying curious and having an open mind about the obstacles in one’s path can help with overcoming them. This mindset was key through navigating his educational and career path, which has not been free of challenges.

    While he hoped to begin his graduate studies immediately after the completion of his undergraduate degree in applied physics from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in Bauchi, Nigeria, Chung faced two major setbacks: the National Youth Service Corps program, a mandatory, one-year program for all Nigerian graduates, and funding. In order to pursue his dream of becoming a physicist, Chung needed to find a graduate program with adequate funding to fulfill his needs.

    Despite these obstacles, Chung kept an optimistic attitude and persevered to where he is today. Chung went on to receive two master's degrees: the first in theoretical and applied physics from the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, and the second being a European master's degree in nuclear physics from the Nucphys Consortium, a collaboration of the University of Seville (Spain), the University of Padova (Italy), and the University of Caen (France). Since August 2022, he has been a Ph.D. student in a nuclear physics group within the Department of Physics at Virginia Tech.

    Despite the roadblocks on his journey, Chung remains optimistic, viewing the two-year period in his life in which these challenges occurred not as a hardship but as “pathways to progress.”