Merit Award Recipients 2023

2023 Merit Award Winners

Graduate Student

• Xilin Liang: For his contributions to the STAR forward calorimeter and simulations for the EIC.
• Daniel Lis: For his contributions to the sPHENIX detector trigger, detector simulations, and commissioning.

Postdoctoral Fellows

• Virginia Bailey: For her contributions to sPHENIX, including contributions to the sPHENIX electromagnetic calorimeter, hadronic calorimeter, and jet physics.
• Anthony Hodges: For his contributions to the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeter construction, electromagnetic calorimeter commissioning and to the jet structure topical group.
• Yu Hu: For his role in the chiral magnetic effect search using the isobar data and for his crucial contributions to the STAR forward silicon tracker project.
• Charles Hughes: For his leadership in the installation, commissioning, and calibration of the sPHENIX time projection chamber.
• Timothy Rinn: For his contributions to the construction, commissioning and operation of the sPHENIX electromagnetic calorimeter and service as the sPHENIX jet convener.
• Evgeny Shulga: For his numerous key contributions to the design, construction, commissioning, and analysis of the sPHENIX time projection chamber.

Senior Scientists

• Ting Lin: For his creativity and ingenuity applied to improving measurements of the origin of the proton spin, as well as his service work supporting the calorimeters and detector upgrades in STAR.
• Md Nasim: For his investigations of the collectivity of strange hadrons in QCD matter, his contributions to beam energy scan analyses as a convener, and his service on the STAR talks committee.
• Matthew Posik: For his contributions to the STAR spin program, contributions to EPIC, and mentoring young students.