NEWPORT NEWS, VA , July 28: Tommaso Rainaldi had a nontraditional path to physics. He is one of a set of triplets, born and raised in the small Italian town of Grosseto. He became a junior world champion roller skater.
But the hard sciences also intrigued him in his youth. And so, after middle school, when Rainaldi was given the choice of which high school to attend, he chose the Liceo Scientifico, or what he calls the “scientific one.”
After high school, Rainaldi recalled recently, “I knew I wanted to continue studying, and physics really called to me because it seemed where everything started to make sense.”
Rainaldi went on to earn a bachelor’s in physics and a master’s in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa. Then, in September 2025, a doctorate in theoretical physics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.
His doctoral work was spent under the aegis of ODU associate professor of physics Ted Rogers, delving deeper into hadronic structure — the composite subatomic particles that make up almost all visible mass in the universe — with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
Now, Rainaldi’s dissertation about that research has earned him the 2025 Jefferson Science Associates Thesis Prize, a top honor for graduate students in nuclear physics.
“When I was told I was awarded the prize, I finally felt that the research we have been doing so far means something, and people recognize it,” Rainaldi said. “I am sure there were a lot of talented people among the candidates, both theoreticians and experimentalists, and I cannot possibly know why they were not chosen. I can only say that my work tried to connect three different groups: the theoreticians, the experimentalists and the phenomenologists (sometimes these categories are not mutually exclusive).
“But my point is that it was for everybody that studies hadronic structure, and it is also, I believe, fundamental if we want to study the structure of the hadrons correctly.”
The prize is awarded every year to a doctoral student conducting Jefferson Lab-related research. Winners are selected based on the quality of their writing, the student’s contribution to the research, the impact of that research on the field of physics and how the work contributes to science at Jefferson Lab or to other experiments. It comes with a $2,500 cash award, a commemorative plaque and travel reimbursement to make a presentation at the lab’s Annual Users Group meeting.
The award was funded through the JSA Initiatives Fund Program, which ceased operation with the assumption of the M&O contract by SURATech (a partnership of SURA and Virginia Tech) on June 1, 2026. Several programs formerly in the JSA Initiatives Fund Program will continue under SURATech.
In 2023, Rainaldi was also awarded a prestigious JSA graduate fellowship, offered to next-generation nuclear physicists to work on cutting-edge projects at Jefferson Lab.
“I think what intrigues me about physics is that, in a way, it is the most natural development for people who ask questions about why and how the world works,” Rainaldi said. “I never liked lazy answers that cannot be disproved. It just stems from curiosity in the end, but it is that kind of curiosity that drives you to ask more questions and correct or shift your understanding continuously. I suppose this is true for all the sciences, or at least I hope.”I often like to say that physics is everything, but of course we physicists don’t know most things and that is what drives us. If we knew everything, life would be very boring.”
A novel approach to TMDs
The most familiar hadrons are protons and neutrons, which form the nucleus of every atom. They’re called hadrons since they exist because of the strong nuclear force — “hadros” means “strong” in ancient Greek — a force of incredible strength, roughly 100 times that of electromagnetism.
Protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks and gluons, known collectively as partons. Quarks are the fundamental building blocks, while gluons are the “glue” particles that bind them together.
Physicists are still trying to understand how it all works, particularly how partons move and why. Transverse Momentum Dependent (TMD) phenomenologists, for instance, study the 3D momentum structure of protons and neutrons by combining quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory, modeling and the data from experiments like those conducted at Jefferson Lab using its powerful Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). CEBAF is a DOE Office of Science user facility that supports the research of more than 1,700 scientific users worldwide.
Rainaldi’s thesis, “Unraveling Nonperturbative QCD with Transverse Momentum Hadronic Structures,” describes how he and his team developed a new method, which they call the Hadron Structure Oriented (HSO) approach, to more faithfully bridge theory about TMDs with experimental measurements.
“My collaborators and I tested our approach using existing experimental data and showed that it worked,” Rainaldi said. “More specifically, we extracted the TMDs of the quarks inside the proton using low-energy experimental data. Then we took what we had extracted from that data and tried to see if it could predict another set of data from a completely different experiment at much higher energy results. The results were that we could successfully predict those data.
“The hope is that, in future extractions, of the same TMDs or more complicated ones, our approach will minimize the theoretical errors that may be made.”
‘Exciting times’
Since September 2025, Rainaldi has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University in New York. There, he has shifted his focus somewhat toward simulating theories like QCD by using quantum computers.
“This is very exciting because we will have this new technology that can complement the experiments and allows us to probe even deeper into the understanding of nature,” Rainaldi said. “In a not-so-distant future, we may be able to compute the TMDs of the proton with a quantum computer, and this is also what I am working towards, among other things.”
His long-term goal has always been a career in academia, whether at an institution or university.
“I hope to achieve it as soon as possible,” Rainaldi said. “However, during my years of academia, and especially being a foreigner in the U.S., I have realized that changing topics or focus is not so bad. We never really lose what we gain, we can only take it with us and it helps us improve.
“I still want to pursue fundamental research in nuclear and hadronic physics, but also through the new developing technologies. These are exciting times, and I believe there is still a lot to work on.”
