APS Announces Recipients of the Fall 2022 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.

 

Daphné Lemasquerier 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.

She earned the award “for an insightful and comprehensive study, based on innovative and elegant laboratory experiments, numerical analysis and theoretical modeling, of the non-linear dynamics of Jupiter, including its shallow vortices, deep jets, and their complex interactions.”

Lemasquerier—a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas—received her doctorate from the Institut de Recherche sur les Phénomènes Hors Equilibre in Marseille, France.

 

Rajat Mittal and Roberto Verzicco received the Stanley Corrsin Award, which recognizes a particularly influential contribution to fundamental fluid dynamics.

They earned the award “for seminal and visionary contributions to the development of immersed boundary methods, and for elegantly applying these methods to reveal the physics of a wide variety of fluid flows in complex geometries, including animal locomotion and heart flows.”

Mittal (left) is a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Verzicco is a faculty member at the Università di Roma "Tor Vergata" in Rome, Italy; the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila, Italy; and the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands.

 

The National Ignition Facility’s (NIF) Burning Plasma Team, comprised of dozens of collaborators, has received the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research, which recognizes achievements in plasma physics research.

The team earned the award “for the first laboratory demonstration of a burning deuterium-tritium plasma where alpha heating dominates the plasma energetics.”

The team, whose members span institutions, conducted their work at the NIF at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Photo: Colorized image of a NIF “Big Foot” deuterium-tritium implosion, taken on Feb. 7, 2016. Credit: Don Jedlovec / NIF.

 

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

She earned the award “for a ground-breaking exploration of the liquid-solid interface, leading in particular to a quantitative understanding of the Navier slip condition, based on an exquisite surface force apparatus developed for this purpose.”

Charlaix is a faculty member at the Universite Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France.

 

 

Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz received the Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics, which honors an outstanding early career experimentalist in nuclear physics.

He earned the award “for novel studies of exotic nuclei using precision laser spectroscopy measurements, including the first spectroscopy of short-lived radioactive molecules.”

Ruiz is a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

Amitava Bhattacharjee received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, which recognizes outstanding contributions to plasma physics broadly.

He earned the award “for seminal theoretical investigations of a wide range of fundamental plasma processes, including magnetic reconnection, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, dynamo action, and dusty plasmas, and for pioneering contributions to linking laboratory plasmas to space and astrophysical plasmas.”

Bhattacharjee is a faculty member at Princeton University in New Jersey.

 

Alison R. Christopherson 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.

She earned the award “for theories of fusion alpha heating and metrics to assess proximity to thermonuclear ignition in inertially confined plasmas, and for the development of a novel measurement of hot electron preheat and its spatial distribution in direct-drive laser fusion.”

Christopherson—a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—received her doctorate from the University of Rochester in New York.

 

Jonathan Squire 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 theoretical contributions to our understanding of plasma waves and turbulence in astrophysical plasmas and the solar wind, and for the discovery and characterization of a broad class of instabilities in dusty astrophysical plasmas.”

Squire is a research fellow at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.