Noah Graham (Physics) has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for work with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dartmouth College, Tübingen University in Germany, and Stellenbosch University in South Africa on a project titled Scattering Theory Casimir Methods and Coherent Structures in the Early Universe. The project, which will involve three undergraduate researchers, will focus particularly on techniques for calculating quantum-mechanical Casimir forces and on how oscillons — stable, localized, self-organizing lumps of nonlinear waves — might affect the process of cosmic reheating that followed the Big Bang.