Prize Recipient

Yang Ren
University of Wisconsin

"For experimental characterization of collisionless magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma, including the out-of-plane Hall effect magnetic field and the diffusive electron out-of-flow channel."

Yang Ren received his bachelor's degree in applied physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in China  in 2000.  He was awarded Guo Moruo Scholarship, the highest honor for undergraduates, in 1999, and he received excellent undergraduate thesis award in 2000.

Dr. Ren did his Ph.D. thesis work at magnetic Reconnection eXperiment (MRX) in Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, studying non-MHD effects during magnetic reconnection.  His dissertation work, done with Dr. Masaaki Yamada and Dr. Hantao Ji, experimentally verified the Hall effect and identified the electron diffusion region during magnetic reconnection.  Dr. Ren receive his Ph.D. in plasma physics from Princeton University in 2007.

Dr. Ren joined the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007.  He is presently studying magnetic turbulence in MST, particularly high frequency magnetic fluctuations.  Dr. Ren is a member of the American Physical Society.

Thomas O'Neil, Chair, Mary Ann Sweeney, Cary Forest, Adil Hassam, Scott Parker