May 6, 2024
On Friday, May 3, 2024 members of the Yale Physics community gathered to celebrate the end of a successful academic year and to recognize the accomplishments of its members. Those recognized are listed below.
Faculty Honorees:
Primary Faculty -
- Keith Baker is the academic editor and co-author of a new book “Quantum Entanglement in High Energy Physics,” published by IntechOpen.
- Charles Brown was named to the American Institute of Physics Board of Directors as well as being awarded the Joseph A. Johnson Award for Excellence from the AIP and the National Society of Black Physicists. He also received an Air Force Research Laboratory Young Investigators Award.
- Sarah Demers was chosen as the winner of the 2024 Dylan Hixon ’88 Prize, awarded annually by Yale College for teaching excellence in the natural sciences. She also was elected to Fellowship in the American Physical Society “for important contributions to tau lepton triggering and identification and using the tau signature in the study of Higgs production and decay, and for important leadership both within the ATLAS collaboration and the broader physics community”.
- Karsten Heeger and his collaborators in the Daya Bay Collaboration were awarded the 2023 European Physical Society (EPS) High Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) Prize for an outstanding contribution to high energy physics in an experimental, theoretical, or technological area.
- Chiara Mingarelli was awarded the Marie Curie Alumni Association Career Award for 2023.
- Ian Moult was awarded the Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD.
- Ramamurti Shankar was appointed to the Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences Advisory Board of the Simons Foundation.
- Adriane Steinacker was selected to receive the 2024 Richard H. Brodhead ’68 prize, awarded annually by Yale College for teaching excellence by non-ladder faculty.
Secondary Faculty -
- Charles Ahn received a 2024 Roberts Innovation Fund Award. The award also includes graduate student Kidae Shin.
- Joerg Bewersdorf received a Yale Faculty Innovation Award.
- Michel Devoret and Rob Schoelkopf received the Comstock Prize in Physics from the National Academy of Sciences.
- Yu He received an Air Force Research Laboratory Young Investigators Award.
- Priya Natarajan was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” for 2024 and was also elected a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society for seminal astrophysics research.
- Shruti Puri was awarded the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing “For advancing the theoretical understanding of quantum fault-tolerance in the presence of biased noise”.
- John Wettlaufer was selected as a 2023 SIAM Fellow.
Research Staff Honorees - Research Scientists, Postdocs, Lab Associates, Visiting Fellows:
- James Nikkel and the Wright Lab Advanced Prototyping Center, along with their collaborators, were awarded a Yale Planetary Solutions Project seed grant for their project on atmospheric CO2 monitoring called “Deployment of a Low-Cost Sensor Network to Measure CO2 Emissions and Pollution Exposure Across the City of New Haven”. Wright Lab graduate student and APC deputy director Arina Telles is leading the instrumentation effort for the project.
- Cedric Wilson received the YQI Postdoctoral Fellowship and the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (NSF MPS-Ascend).
Graduate Student Honorees:
- Gabriel Assumpcao was awarded the D. Allan Bromley Fellowship for 2023-2024
- Xiran Bai received a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Award.
- Nathan Borak was selected one of the DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program’s Outstanding U.S. Graduate Students
- Hannah Bossi and Talia Weiss were awarded the D. Allan Bromley Fellowship for 2022-2023.
- John Garmon and Joseph Lap were awarded the 2022-2023 Leigh Page Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching.
- John Garmon and Shivnag Sista won the Yale College teaching Prize in 2022-2023.
- Naomi Gluck (3rd year graduate student) has won the 2024 Associate in Teaching Fellowship to co-teach PHYS 378 Introduction to Scientific Computing & Data Science in the Fall of 2024 with Prof. Daisuke Nagai.
- Aaron Greenberg, Andrew Neeley, and Carlton Smith were offered Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. Emily Pottebaum received an honorable mention.
- Ananya Rai was elected as the junior representative to the Diversity Office of the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
- Arina Telles and the Wright Lab Advanced Prototyping Center, along with their collaborators, were awarded a Yale Planetary Solutions Project Seed grant for their project on atmospheric CO2 monitoring called “Deployment of a Low-Cost Sensor Network to Measure CO2 Emissions and Pollution Exposure Across the City of New Haven”. Wright Lab research scientist and APC director James Nikkel is the PI for the grant.
- Yu-Han Tseng received a 2023 Graduate Instrumentation Research Award from the Coordination Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD, Division of Particles and Fields, American Physical Society)
Undergraduate Student Honorees:
- The Yale Society of Physics Students (2022-2023) won its fourth Outstanding Chapter award.
- Ayelet Kalfus (YC’2024 Physics) was awarded a Marshall Scholarship.
- Rose Powers (YC’2024 Physics-Intensive) was offered a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
- Barkotel Zemenu (YC’2024 Physics-Intensive) was awarded the Jocelyn Bell Outstanding Leadership Scholarship from the Society of Physics Students. He also won the Sigma Pi Sigma Leadership Scholarship, the Yale Science & Engineering Association award for Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement, and has been invited to attend the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting taking place July 2024 in Lindau, Germany.
- Catherine Zhang (YC’2024) Physics & Geosciences received an honorable mention.
Staff Honorees:
- Jeff Ashenfelter, 35 Years of Service
Alumni Honorees:
Undergraduate Students -
- Tristan Weaver (YC’2023 double major in Physics-Intensive and Math-Intensive) received an honorable mention for a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Postdoctoral Associates -
- Danielle Speller, currently an assistant professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University and previously a postdoctoral Associate with Reina Maruyama, received an honorable mention for the Joseph A. Johnson Award for Excellence from the American Institute of Physics and the National Society of Black Physicists.
See below for photos from the event.
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