Rabia Burcu Cakirli (VAR Student with Richard Casten in 2006) was this year’s 1st IUPAP Young Scientist Award winner. She gave a Plenary Talk at the conference on her work.
She got her PhD at Istanbul University in 2009 for research she did with me. (I was here official advisor. Prof.Baki Akkus, now Dean of Sciences there,was her local co-Advisor. Side story: As her advisor I, of course, was on the committee for her thesis defense in Istanbul and even asked a question in Turkish - unfortunately I did not understand the answer !:-)).
She was a VAR student at Yale in 2006 and made several visits to Yale for her research, part of which was carried out at the Tandem. She also took my Physics 524a course. During her graduate years she also won the 2007 Sevket Erk award as the best young scientist in Turkey (the first time a student had ever won it).
Since getting her degree she spent 3 and a half years at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg working with Klaus Blaum and funded by a Humboldt Grant. She is now an Associate Professor back in Turkey working at Istanbul University where she also was just awarded a Max Planck “Partner” Agreement –eligible scientists are those who have had associations with the Max Planck Society and returned to their countries. This allows them to continue to pursue collaborative research.
Finally, her research focuses on single particle and emergent collective behavior in nuclei, exploiting a variety of experimental techniques. Her specialty is exploiting nuclear masses to extract information about nucleon interactions and their role in the emergence of collective behavior and shape/phase transitions in nuclei. She has had a number ( about 5 ) first author PRL papers, and other Letter-type publications, plus numerous Invited Talks at International Conferences.