First Harry Lustig Award Winner Announced

By Andrea Palounek

Sarah L. Bromley from the University of Colorado, Boulder, emerged as the first winner of the APS Four Corners Section’s new prestigious Harry Lustig Award—and boy, what a competitive and exciting session it was!

If anyone had any doubts about the outstanding abilities of our young colleagues, the exciting, stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable award session put them to rest for good.

---

A. Palounek

Sarah Bromley receiving the award from Kathrin Spendier, the chair of the Harry Lustig Award committee.

---

The three finalists were: Chandramouli Nyshadham (Brigham Young University), "Materials Prediction Using High-Throughput and Machine Learning Techniques," Andrew Missert (University of Colorado, Boulder), "Neutrino Oscillation Measurements Using a Maximum Likelihood Event Reconstruction Algorithm", and the winner Sarah L. Bromley (University of Colorado, Boulder), "Probing Many-Body Physics in an Optical Lattice Clock." They were chosen from an impressive field of nominees whose topics spanned all of current physics, a testament in itself to the breadth of science being done in the Four Corners States.

The special Harry Lustig Award session during the annual Four Corners Section Meeting at Colorado State University in Fort Collins included twenty-minute talks from each of our three finalists in which they described their research. It was a difficult decision but eventually Ms. Bromley’s talk won the day.

The annual Harry Lustig Award recognizes exceptional graduate-level work done in one of our states, and consists of a $1,000 award and a certificate of acknowledgement. It honors Harry Lustig, who taught physics at CCNY, was APS Treasurer from 1985 to 1996 , and was instrumental in the creation of the Four Corners section in 1997.

The deadline for nominations for next year’s award is July 10, 2018. For more information visit the Harry Lustig Award page or email lustigaward@aps.org. As the award is not yet fully endowed, anyone wishing to make a contribution to this important new award should do so directly at the Campaign Website. For more information, contact Irene Lukoff, APS Director of Development, at 301-209-3224.

The author is secretary/treasurer of the APS Four Corners Section.