Yale Physics community gathers to celebrate accomplishments

people at standing tables looking at person at podium.
May 24, 2024

On May 3, members of the Yale Physics community gathered to celebrate the end of a successful academic year and to recognize the accomplishments of its members. The members of Wright Lab who were recognized are listed below.

Faculty Honorees:

  • Keith Baker is the academic editor and co-author of a new book “Quantum Entanglement in High Energy Physics,” published by IntechOpen.
  • Charles Brown was named to the American Institute of Physics Board of Directors as well as being awarded the Joseph A. Johnson Award for Excellence from the AIP and the National Society of Black Physicists. He also received an Air Force Research Laboratory Young Investigators Award.
  • Sarah Demers was chosen as the winner of the 2024 Dylan Hixon ’88 Prize, awarded annually by Yale College for teaching excellence in the natural sciences. She also was elected to Fellowship in the American Physical Society “for important contributions to tau lepton triggering and identification and using the tau signature in the study of Higgs production and decay, and for important leadership both within the ATLAS collaboration and the broader physics community”.
  • Karsten Heeger and his collaborators in the Daya Bay Collaboration were awarded the 2023 European Physical Society (EPS) High Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) Prize for an outstanding contribution to high energy physics in an experimental, theoretical, or technological area.
  • Ian Moult was awarded the Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD.

Research Staff Honorees:

  • James Nikkel and the Wright Lab Advanced Prototyping Center, along with their collaborators, were awarded a Yale Planetary Solutions Project seed grant for their project on atmospheric CO2 monitoring called “Deployment of a Low-Cost Sensor Network to Measure CO2 Emissions and Pollution Exposure Across the City of New Haven”. Wright Lab graduate student and APC deputy director Arina Telles is leading the instrumentation effort for the project.

Graduate Student Honorees:

  • Xiran Bai received a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Award.
  • Nathan Borak was selected one of the DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program’s Outstanding U.S. Graduate Students
  • Hannah Bossi and Talia Weiss were awarded the D. Allan Bromley Fellowship for 2022-2023.
  • Emily Pottebaum received an honorable mention for the Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. 
  • Ananya Rai was elected as the junior representative to the Diversity Office of the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
  • Arina Telles and the Wright Lab Advanced Prototyping Center, along with their collaborators, were awarded a Yale Planetary Solutions Project Seed grant for their project on atmospheric CO2 monitoring called “Deployment of a Low-Cost Sensor Network to Measure CO2 Emissions and Pollution Exposure Across the City of New Haven”. Wright Lab research scientist and APC director James Nikkel is the PI for the grant.
  • Yu-Han Tseng received a 2023 Graduate Instrumentation Research Award from the Coordination Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD, Division of Particles and Fields, American Physical Society)

Undergraduate Student Honorees:

  • The Yale Society of Physics Students (2022-2023) won its fourth Outstanding Chapter award.
  • Rose Powers (YC’2024 Physics-Intensive) was offered a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
  • Barkotel Zemenu (YC’2024 Physics-Intensive) was awarded the Jocelyn Bell Outstanding Leadership Scholarship from the Society of Physics Students. He also won the Sigma Pi Sigma Leadership Scholarship, the Yale Science & Engineering Association award for Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement, and has been invited to attend the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting taking place July 2024 in Lindau, Germany.

Staff Honorees:

  • Jeff Ashenfelter, 35 Years of Service

Alumni Honorees:

  • Danielle Speller, currently an assistant professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University and previously a postdoctoral Associate with Reina Maruyama, received an honorable mention for the Joseph A. Johnson Award for Excellence from the American Institute of Physics and the National Society of Black Physicists.

See our Flickr Album for photos from the event.

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