The 2024 Winners of the US ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards have officially been announced! Congratulations to all Recipients!
US ATLAS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Mitch Newcomer, University of Pennsylvania
The U.S. ATLAS Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individuals who have had scientific, leadership, or administrative distinction on behalf of U.S. ATLAS beyond that normally expected of ATLAS colleagues. The awardee in 2024 is Mitch Newcomer, an electronics designer at the University of Pennsylvania. His award carried the following citation:
In recognition of broad contributions to electronics in the U.S. ATLAS program with emphasis on front‐end electronics, both digital and analog. Those innovative approaches for the readout of the Transition Radiation Tracker and the Liquid Argon Calorimeter and the Inner Tracker have ensured performant, robust, and cost‐effective systems with long lifetimes. The clever design concepts carried through to detailed design, prototyping, production, installation, commissioning, and maintenance. A long list of leading contributions to radiation testing, power distribution, grounding and shielding, and generally sharing your insights in review committees and with younger colleagues are greatly appreciated.
US ATLAS OUTSTANDING EARLY CAREER AWARD:
Syed Haider Abidi, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Giorgio Vallone, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The U.S. ATLAS Early Career Award recognizes early career colleagues for a specific exceptional contribution to U.S. ATLAS. The awardees in 2024 are Haider Abidi and Giorgio Vallone. Their award carried the following citation:
In recognition of your contributions towards the success of the ATLAS ITk Strip project, specifically in the establishment and evolution of the simulation effort to understand the sensor fracturing observed when cooling the staves to operational temperature. This innovative, proactive approach helped to solve the last technical problem prior to full‐scale module production and stave assembly. Without this expertise and hard work as a team, ATLAS would be nowhere near the solution to this critical issue for the ITk Strip Upgrade.
Haider Abidi is a physicist in the Physics Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is active in the ITk Strip Detector upgrade and data analysis of the Higgs boson.
Giorgio Vallone is a research scientist/engineer in the Engineering Division at Berkeley Lab. He is active in the ITk Strip Detector upgrade and mechanical design at the lab.
US ATLAS OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT AWARD:
The annual US ATLAS Outstanding Graduate Student Award recognizes graduate students who are candidates for a degree at a US ATLAS institution who have made exceptional contributions to the ATLAS experiment. The awardees in 2024 are Yuzhan Zhao and Luis Felipe Gutierrez.
Yuzhan Zhao, University of California, Santa Cruz
Yuzhan graduated from UC Santa Cruz in June 2024. During his time on ATLAS, he has worked on detector development, physics modeling studies, and Standard Model data analysis. Yuzhan was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz. His award carried the following citation:
In recognition of your outstanding contributions to the ATLAS experiment, in particular for your careful and expert characterization of Low Gain Avalanche Detector prototypes for the ATLAS High Granularity Timing Detector and for your extensive contributions to V+jets modeling, software tools, and analysis.
Luis Felipe Gutierrez Zagazeta, University of Pennsylvania
Luis has been working with the electronics group at Penn with a focus on the ITk Strip Detector project. He has contributed to several projects that enabled cutting-edge solutions for the ATLAS experiment. Luis was an undergrad at UC Irvine. His award carried the following citation:
For your broad contributions to the ITk‐strip project for the high‐luminosity ATLAS upgrade. In particular, this award recognizes your leading efforts in establishing the prototype and production wafer probing of the Autonomous Monitor and Control ASIC and your studies of single‐event errors; radiation tests, including developing a GEANT4‐based simulation, of the GaNFET switches; and work in module and stave testing and the development of ITk‐strip production‐database resources for BNL.
