The NSF CAREER Award is one of the highest honors granted by the NSF to young faculty members in the area of science and engineering, and is intended to support their career-development activities.

The five-year, $400,000 grant was awarded to Petrov for his proposal titled "CAREER: An Integrated Research and Education Program in Physics of Heavy Hadrons." Alexey will develop new theoretical and computational methods to study effects of strong interactions in the decays and production of particles containing heavy quarks. He will also work with greater Detroit high schools to develop an educational program in computational science.

Petrov received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1997. He joined Wayne State University faculty in 2001 after postdoctoral appointments at the Johns Hopkins and Cornell Universities.