Merit Award Recipients 2021

2021 Merit Award Winners

Senior Graduate Students

• Jamie Karthein: for her crucial research into the physics of fundamental theory of strong interactions via numerical simulations for the BES program.
• Daniel Richford: for his tireless leadership ensuring the safe and timely assemble and testing of the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeter during a global pandemic.
• Zhen Wang: for his indispensable contributions to the STAR forward upgrade, dilepton research, and STAR operations especially during the pandemic.

Postdoctoral Fellows

• Yasser Corrales Morales: for his outstanding contributions to the sPHENIX Monolithic-Active-Pixel-Sensor based Vertex Detector project.
•  Cameron Dean: for his essential contributions to the heavy flavor program in sPHENIX through simulations as well as software and detector development.
• Kolja Kauder: for his innovation contributions in understanding the jet energy loss and the microscopic nature of the QGP via jet substructure measurements at STAR.
• Shenghui Zhang: for her breakthrough measurements of open heavy flavour production and invaluable contributions to detector upgrades for STAR.

Senior Scientists

• Rosi Reed: for her herculean efforts as shift coordinator for STAR during a global pandemic and her central role in building and commissioning of the Event Plane Detector.
• Xuan Li: for her exceptional contributions to the understanding of hadronic structure and nuclear matter with PHENIX, and her leadership in developing a heavy quark program at the future Electron-Ion Collider.
• Sanghoon Lim: for his exceptional contributions to the intellectual leadership of key measurements with the PHENIX experiment and detector development in sPHENIX.
• Rongrong Ma: for his leadership to the heavy flavour program, detector development and invaluable service to STAR as the analysis coordinator.