Prize Recipient

Yonatan F. Kahn
MIT

"for proposing a novel method to detect dark photons, for developing halo-independent techniques of direct dark matter detection, and for finding a new viable supersymmetric extension of the standard model."

Yonatan (Yoni) Kahn is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He has proposed novel experimental designs to detect MeV-scale dark matter and axion dark matter, developed halo-independent techniques for dark matter direct detection, and constructed supersymmetric effective field theories relevant for both colliders and cosmology. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from MIT, under the supervision of Jesse Thaler, and holds joint degrees in music and physics from Northwestern University (B.A., B.Mus 2009), where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. In 2010 he completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos with Distinction at the University of Cambridge supported by a Churchill Scholarship. Dr. Kahn was an NSF Graduate Fellow and recipient of the Andrew M. Lockett Memorial Fund Award for Graduate Research at MIT. He is also co-author of "Conquering the Physics GRE, a reference to help undergraduates prepare for the Physics GRE exam.

Thomas Rizzo (Chair), Doreen Wackeroth (Vice Chair), Csaba Csaki, Konstantin Matchev, Stephen Profumo