2023 Scharff-Goldhaber Prize Ceremony and Talk, 8/15
July 24, 2023
Graduate student Xiaofeng Wang of Shandong University has been named the winner of the 2023 Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize, consisting of $4,000 and a certificate. Partially funded by Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), the company that manages Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the award was established in 1992 by Brookhaven Women in Science (BWIS), a nonprofit organization that supports and encourages the advancement of women in science.
The award ceremony will be held on Tuesday, Aug. 15, at noon in the Bldg. 510 Large Conference Room, as well as online. Wang will give a talk titled “Energy dependence of Breit-Wheeler process in heavy-ion collisions and its application to nuclear charge radius measurements,” followed by a question-and-answer session and complimentary lunch.
This event is free and open to the public. Note, off-site visitors will be asked to park at the Bldg. 30 assembly area and take a designated shuttle to the event location at 11:45 am.
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The Scharff-Goldhaber Prize recognizes substantial promise and accomplishment by female graduate students in physics who are enrolled in the graduate program at Stony Brook University and/or performing their thesis research at Brookhaven Lab. The award commemorates the outstanding contributions of the late nuclear physicist Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber. In 1950, Scharff-Goldhaber became the first female Ph.D. physicist appointed to the Brookhaven Lab staff. She was also a founding member of BWIS.
About This Year’s Winner
Wang pursued her undergraduate degree in physics at Qufu Normal University in China, where she graduated in 2018. She then chose to specialize in particle physics and nuclear physics to study the smallest and most basic constituents of matter and their interactions. She joined the Lab’s STAR collaboration in 2019, which is an international experiment that investigates the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
“I have been fascinated by physics since I was a young student,” Wang said. “I wanted to understand the fundamental nature of matter and energy and the origin and evolution of the universe.”
Under the supervision of Zhangbu Xu, Chi Yang, and Daniel Brandenburg, Wang started her research on the Breit-Wheeler process, which is a quantum phenomenon that converts photons into electron-positron pairs. This process was discovered at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and could provide valuable information on the electromagnetic properties of the quark-gluon plasma. Wang has presented her work on behalf of the STAR collaboration at several international conferences, such as Quark Matter 2022.
“I am very enthusiastic and motivated to be part of this frontier research,” Wang said. “I hope to make significant contributions to the advancement of particle physics and nuclear physics.”
About This Year’s Supporters
"According to the National Science Foundation's Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (2017) Report, women earning degrees in physics is the lowest of all the physical sciences,” noted Jessica Gasparik, Scharff-Goldhaber Prize Co-Chair and BWIS President Elect. “This award serves to highlight pioneering women in this underrepresented field."
Added Marc-André Pleier, Scharff-Goldhaber Co-Chair, “These rising stars in physics serve as role models for the next generation of scientists."
In addition to BSA, BWIS gratefully acknowledges the Brookhaven National Laboratory Nuclear & Particle Physics Directorate, Physics Department, Energy & Photon Sciences Directorate, the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Office, and the Long Island Section of the American Nuclear Society for their generous donations toward this year’s prize.
BWIS also thanks the hard work and commitment of BWIS Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize Co-Chairs Gasparik and Pleier, of the Collider-Accelerator and Physics Departments, respectively, for overseeing selection of the Scharff-Goldhaber Prize, and Prize Committee members Björn Schenke, Aihong Tang, and Elizabeth Worcester, all from the Lab’s Physics Department.
Their support, and this year’s donors, enable BWIS and the Laboratory to attract, develop, and retain a diverse and inclusive workforce in the pursuit of world-class science.
2023-21364 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
