Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Benjamin Nachman
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Citation:

"For innovative contributions to the search for new physics in collider data incorporating original machine learning algorithms, and for the effective communication of these new techniques to the broader physics community."

Background:

Benjamin Nachman is currently a Staff Scientist in the Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Research Affiliate at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He completed an undergraduate degree in physics, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University in 2012, a masters degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University (as a Churchill Scholar) in 2013, and a Ph.D. in physics with a Ph.D. minor in statistics from Stanford University in 2016. He was a Chamberlain postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Lab from 2016-2020. Nachman is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where he studies the emergent behavior of the strong force in the form of high energy jets and searches for new fundamental particles in hadronic final states. He develops and deploys new machine learning techniques designed to solve unique challenges in particle physics. As a postdoc, Nachman investigated radiation damage to silicon detectors for ATLAS and in RD50. Now, he also explores near-term applications of quantum computing and studies ep collisions as a member of the H1 Collaboration. Nachman received the 2018 Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early Career Research in Quantum Chromodynamics, the 2021 Guido Altarelli Award, and the 2021 European Physical Society Young Experimental Physicist Prize.


Selection Committee:

Ed Blucher (chair); University of Chicago Rafael Lang (vice chair); Purdue University Henriette Elvang, University of Michigan Brenna Flaugher, Fermilab Jaroslav Trnka ((2021 Primakoff Award winner), UC Davis LianTao Wang, University of Chicago