Alumna Sowjanya Gollapinni was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville, starting Fall, 2016, where she leads a research team exploring the physics of neutrinos. Prof. Gollapinni earned a Ph.D. in physics at Wayne State in 2012 working with advisor Prof. Paul Karchin on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

After receiving her Ph.D. she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Kansas State University working on the "MicroBooNE" neutrino experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. In 2015, she was awarded a prestigious Intensity Frontier Fellowship at Fermilab. This year, she was elected to the Users Executive Committee of Fermilab which represents over three thousand scientists and engineers from forty-four countries.