Merit Award Recipients 2024

2024 Merit Award Winners

Graduate Student

• Tanner Mengel For his invaluable contributions to the success of the sPHENIX MVTX, including assisting with the read-out electronics, commissioning and the physical installation of the MVTX detector at BNL and for his work in understanding jet background subtraction methods in sPHENIX, which will be broadly applicable to using jets to understand heavy-ion collisions.

Postdoctoral Fellows

• Niseem Abdelrahman For his essential role in elucidating the viscous and chiral properties of the medium formed in RHIC collisions across various systems and energies with the STAR detector and service to the broader community through online platforms.
• Grigory Nigmatkulov For his exceptional contributions to studies in the STAR experiment of multi-particle correlations, collective flow, flow fluctuations, and vorticity. He has also made significant service contributions to STAR as working group co-convenor for Correlations and Fluctuations, and as developer of the STAR PicoDST data model which is the basis of all modern analyses in STAR.
• JaeBeom Park For his extensive contributions to sPHENIX, including the sPHENIX data acquisition, calorimeter electronics, and Bulk Physics program.
• Krista Smith For her essential role in the study of charmonium production in the PHENIXCollaboration, her service as a member of the PHENIX Executive Council and her DEI effort mentoring Native American women in nuclear physics research.

Senior Scientists

• Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli For their exceptional commitment to promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion, including their efforts to engage high-school students in scientific research, as well as their innovative development of a new method to quantify the time ordering of parton showers in proton-proton collisions which allows a better understanding of QCD Jets.
• Jean-Francois Paquet For his impactful contributions to the study of photon production in the QGP, his work in the application of machine learning and advanced statistical techniques to the study of high-energy nuclear collisions, his leadership in the soft-physics sector of the JETSCAPE collaboration, and his significant contributions to the development of the 2023 NSAC Long Range Plan.