The future EIC program and its impact on hadron tomography and HEP phenomenology

As embodied by its placement in the 2015 Nuclear Science Long Range Plan and subsequent NAS Report, the goal of designing and constructing a high-luminosity electron-ion collider (EIC) is crucial to the future of hadron/particle physics. This machine will dramatically enhance our knowledge of a wide array of phenomena at work in QCD bound states, including a comprehensive mapping of the partonic substructure of hadrons --- especially for the proton and lighter mesons. While these explorations of hadron structure will necessarily extend to transverse momentum-dependent observables, in this talk I will concentrate on the prospects for an EIC to sharpen our understanding of the proton's collinear parton distribution functions (PDFs) and derived quantities covering a wide energy spectrum, including Mellin moments calculable on the QCD lattice and theoretical predictions for Higgs production at hadron colliders. On this basis, I will outline the impact we can expect from an EIC on our understanding of hadrons' internal tomography at lower energies as well as the role it will play enhancing the discovery potential along the energy frontier.