On 14 June, LHCb, which comprises over 1000 authors and 400 PhD students, announced the winners of the 2022 PhD Thesis and Early-Career Scientist Awards. The LHCb Thesis Awards recognise excellent PhD theses and additional work that have made an exceptional contribution to LHCb. In parallel, the Early-Career Scientist prizes are awarded to recognise outstanding achievements of early-career scientists for the benefit of LHCb.
This year’s winners of the Thesis prize are Giulia Tulci (University of Pisa), Guillaume Pietrzyk (EPFL) and Mengzhen Wang (Tsinghua).
Maarten van Veghel (Groningen), Saverio Mariani (Florence), Sevda Esen (Zurich), Valeriia Zhovkovska (Orsay), Maarten Van Dijk (Lausanne), Fabio Ferrari (Bologna) and Vladyslav Orlov (CERN) were awarded the Early-Career prize.
“The Thesis prize is awarded to students who have performed exceptional research in their PhD and contributed fully to the collaboration,” explains Ulrik Egede, chair of the Thesis committee. “This year’s winners worked in charm CP violation and mixing and complex amplitude analyses for spectroscopy but also contributed to the trigger, novel FPGA-based tracking, outreach and the construction of the Upgrade I tracker.”
The prizes for outstanding contributions by early-career scientists were awarded for a wide range of activities. “The prizes this year recognised improvements to electron identification and reconstruction, real-time reconstruction of beam–gas collisions, the persistence of the data produced by the trigger and the development of LHCb's new luminometer system,” says Irina Nasteva, chair of the Early-Career Prize committee.
Irina and Ulrik agreed that the standard of the work carried out by the many individuals nominated for the prizes was very high and demonstrated the strength and breadth of the work performed by the younger colleagues at the experiment.