BATON ROUGE, LA. (NBC33) — Southern University professor James Matthews has been named a fellow by the American Physical Society, one of the world’s largest organizations of physicists.

Matthews holds a joint appointment as a professor of physics at Southern and at Louisiana State University.

Matthews earned a BS in physics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2010, Matthews was elected co-spokesperson for the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory in the Mendoza Province in Argentina. The Observatory is studying ultra-high energy cosmic rays, the most energetic and rarest particles in the universe.