The American Physical Society (APS) Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) recently announced their 2026 honors recipients. Two of the three recipients are Wright Lab alumni: Danielle Norcini ‘19 PhD and Jiaxiang Wang ‘25 PhD. DNP will present these awards at the upcoming DNP Annual Meeting, recognizing the outstanding achievements and contributions of these scientists to the field.
Wright Lab alumni receive 2026 American Physical Society awards
Danielle Norcini, now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, received the Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics “for the development of novel detection techniques for low energy subatomic particles, and implementing them for the pursuit of new physical phenomena.” This award is presented annually to an outstanding early career experimentalist in nuclear physics and includes an invitation and support to attend the Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) to give a prize talk, as well as a cash prize.
At Wright Lab, Norcini played a critical role in the development, construction, and analysis of the PROSPECT reactor neutrino experiment, which was designed to search for eV-scale sterile neutrinos and make a precision measurement of reactor antineutrinos at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National laboratory.
As a postdoc, and now faculty member, Norcini switched her focus to the development of novel instrumentation to search for dark matter. She helped develop skipper CCDs for the DAMIC-M experiment and is now leading an interdisciplinary group at Johns Hopkins University to develop novel quantum-imaging detectors at the eV-scale combining expertise from particle physics, materials science, and detector physics.
Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, the Director of Yale’s Wright Lab, and Norcini’s PhD advisor said, “Danielle chooses to pursue some of the biggest and most challenging questions in physics and applies her talents in developing novel instrumentation to advance our experimental frontiers in neutrino physics and dark matter searches. I am thrilled to see that her work on the development of novel neutrino and dark matter detectors and experimental efforts to search for new physics are recognized with the APS Freedman Award.”
Heeger also noted that Norcini’s award and her work honors the work of experimental physicist Stuart J Freedman, who was a postdoctoral advisor to both Heeger and Wright Lab Professor Reina Maruyama at UC Berkeley, and whose work spans a broad range of fundamental physics experiments from the study of neutrino oscillation and double beta decay searches to precision atomic physics.
Jiaxiang Wang, now a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA, was awarded one of two American Physical Society’s 2026 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics. The award recognizes doctoral thesis research of outstanding quality and achievement in nuclear physics. The second award went to David Neto from Michigan State University.
Wang’s thesis was entitled “Levitated Optomechanical Sensors for Fundamental Physics”. The award citation reads, “For pioneering work developing optomechanical sensors for nuclear-physics research, including loading with radioisotopes and detection of recoil forces from single nuclear alpha decays.”
Wang’s Ph.D. advisor at Yale, associate professor of physics David Moore, said, “Congratulations to Jiaxiang on this well-deserved award. It was fantastic to see his thesis work take what was originally just a vague idea to a clear demonstration that he could detect the tiny forces from single nuclear decays in just a few years during his PhD. As noted by the selection committee, this work has the potential to lay the foundation for a number of new techniques in nuclear physics, and it is great to see this work recognized this way.”
Wang said, “I am deeply honored to receive this award and grateful to everyone in Dave’s group and at Wright Lab, as well as the colleagues in Yale’s Departments of Physics, Applied Physics, and Electrical Engineering who helped make this research possible. I am especially grateful to Dave for his guidance and his faith in the potential of this elegant technique. I hope this work will open new opportunities to explore nuclear and fundamental physics with mechanical sensors.”