Symmetry factor

It’s spring — prime time for a college newsletter. Ours is called CLAS Notes (CLAS is for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences). It’s a nice newsletter which has interesting stuff about stuff that happens in our College. Nice read. This year, however, our editor decided to include a new section — grants and awards (presumably awarded from the time previous newsletter was published). Closely examining it I realized that my funding comes from a slightly unusual source, Nutrition and Food Science, given that I’m a particle theorist, mainly working on dynamics of heavy quark systems. Check it out (click on a picture to make it bigger):

Wow! Now, tell me that I’m not doing biophysics! Actually, I’m in a good company — my colleague from condensed matter physics, a couple of computer scientists, several mathematicians and even a professor from English Department! Now, it is understandable why I was ascribed that source of funding — I myself saw “Quark” in a cheese section of our grocery store a couple of days ago. But apparently one of research directions of our English department is relation of poetry and food, I guess..

P.S. In reality my funding comes from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy (have to acknowledge them in every publication)…