Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Nhan Tran
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Citation:

"For wide-ranging contributions to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, including the development of a novel pileup subtraction method at the Large Hadron Collider, and the use of jet substructure for the analysis of high-energy collisions."

Background:

Nhan Tran is currently a Wilson Fellow at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He completed his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University in 2005 and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2011, working on the compact muon solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He continued his work on the CMS experiment as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Tran’s research focus is on using accelerator-based experiments to search for new phenomena. He made significant contributions to the discovery and characterization of the Higgs boson at the LHC. He has worked on techniques and tools at the LHC to broadly enhance the physics capability: advancing the deployment of jet substructure tools, developing novel pileup mitigation techniques, and recently, establishing tools to employ machine learning in trigger electronics. He has performed original analyses at the LHC to search for light dijet resonances and explore Higgs couplings at high momentum.  Recently, he has also been developing fixed-target accelerator experiments to search for light, thermal dark matter. Tran is a recipient of the Universities Research Association (URA) Tollestrup Award for Postdoctoral Research, was an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher, a URA visiting scholar, and was supported by an National Science Foundation Graduate Student Award.


Selection Committee:

2019 Selection Committee Members: Bogdan Dobrescu (Chair), Doreen Wackeroth (Vice-Chair), Cecilia Gerber, Masahiro Morii, Donna Naples, Eric Dahl ('18 Recipient)