APS Announces Recipients of the Fall 2023 Prizes and Awards

Each year, APS recognizes outstanding achievement in research, education, and public service. This year’s fall award recipients, listed below, were selected from hundreds of nominees from across the physics community. APS congratulates them and applauds their dedication to science.

Karol Bacik

Karol Bacik received the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics, which recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of fluid dynamics.

He earned the award “for an elegant study of dune-dune repulsion and dune-obstacle interaction using laboratory experiments, data analysis, and mathematical modeling, elucidating the intricate feedback between sediment dynamics and fluid mechanics.”

Bacik is an instructor in applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

George Haller

George Haller received the Stanley Corrsin Award, which recognizes a particularly influential contribution to fundamental fluid dynamics.

He earned the award “for long-lasting contributions to the predictive understanding and mathematical underpinnings of the nonlinear dynamics of fluid flows and Lagrangian coherent structures, and for novel data-driven approaches to reduced order modeling.”

Haller is the chair in nonlinear dynamics at ETH Zürich in Switzerland.

Philip J. Morrison, Hong Qin, Eric Sonnendrücker

Three researchers – Philip J. Morrison, Hong Qin, and Eric Sonnendrücker – have received the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research, which recognizes achievements in plasma physics research.

The team earned the award “for establishing and shaping the field of structure-preserving geometric algorithms for plasma physics.”

Morrison holds the Texas Atomic Energy Research Foundation Professorship at the University of Texas, Austin. Qin is a principal research physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton University. Sonnendrücker is the director of the Numerical Methods in Plasma Physics division at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and a mathematics professor at the Technical University of Munich.

Elisabeth Guazzelli

Elisabeth Guazzelli received the Fluid Dynamics Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in fluid dynamics research.

She earned the award “for ground-breaking experiments on fluid-particle systems; for advances in the unification of the rheological description of dry granular media and dense "wet" suspensions; for guidance of theory through focused and creative experiments; and for leadership in the fluid mechanics community.”

Guazzelli, who is based at the MSC (Matière et Systèmes Complexes) Laboratory of Université Paris Cité, is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Elise Novitski

Elise Novitski received the Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics, which honors an outstanding early career experimentalist in nuclear physics.

She earned the award “for the development and analysis of the Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy method and its application to the measurement of neutrino mass.”

Novitski is an assistant professor in physics at the University of Washington.

Thomas M. Antonsen Jr.

Thomas M. Antonsen Jr. received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, which recognizes outstanding contributions to plasma physics broadly.

He earned the award “for pioneering contributions in the theory of magnetized plasma stability, RF current drive, laser-plasma interactions, and charged particle beam dynamics.”

Antonsen is a physics professor, Distinguished University Professor, and the ECE Professor of Electrophysics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ian Emanuel Ochs

Ian Emanuel Ochs received the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, which recognizes a young plasma physicist who has performed original thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement.

He earned the award “for developing rigorous constraints on charge extraction across magnetic fields and powerful theorems relating lower hybrid current drive to alpha channeling, and for studying unusual transport effects with diverse applications in multi-species magnetized plasmas.”

Ochs, a DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton at Princeton University, received his doctorate from Princeton in 2022.

David Turnbull

David Turnbull received the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research, which recognizes early career physicists' contributions to plasma physics research.

He earned the award “for pioneering experimental work on plasma photonics in the pursuit of laser-plasma applications, including Raman amplification, plasma optics, and inertial confinement fusion.”

Turnbull is a staff scientist and group leader at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics.