David Balut, a senior physics major at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is one of 16 students nationwide awarded a Churchill Scholarship for graduate study at Cambridge — the first Illinois recipient in 20 years, chosen from a record 159 nominees. The honor builds directly on the Barry Goldwater Scholarship he received in 2025, the same year he was named an Astronaut Scholar. In Professor Peter Abbamonte’s group he led an inelastic X-ray scattering experiment at Argonne National Laboratory and a project measuring entanglement in materials, and at Brookhaven National Laboratory he measured altermagnetic-lattice modes in a material for the first time. At Cambridge he will study the collective behavior of electron spin in strongly interacting matter with Professor Claudio Castelnovo.