The American Physical Society has awarded Fermilab scientist Nhan Tran the 2019 Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics. He received the award for wide-ranging contributions to the CMS experiment, including the development of a novel pileup subtraction method at the Large Hadron Collider and the use of jet substructure for the analysis of high-energy collisions.
The Primakoff Award, established in 2011, is given in recognition of outstanding contributions made by physicists who are just beginning their careers and to help promote the careers of exceptionally promising young physicists. The prize is given annually and consists of $1,500 and a certificate citing the contributions of the recipient, plus an allowance for travel to an APS meeting to receive the award and deliver an invited lecture.
Tran is a Wilson fellow. His research focuses on using accelerator-based experiments to search for new phenomena. He made significant contributions to the discovery and characterization of the Higgs boson at the LHC and has worked on techniques and tools at the LHC to broadly enhance the physics capability: advancing the deployment of jet substructure tools, developing novel pileup mitigation techniques, and recently, establishing tools to employ machine learning in trigger electronics. He has performed original analyses at the LHC to search for light dijet resonances and explore Higgs couplings at high momentum. Recently, he has also been developing fixed-target accelerator experiments to search for light, thermal dark matter. Tran is a recipient of the Universities Research Association Tollestrup Award for Postdoctoral Research, was an LHC Physics Center distinguished researcher, a URA visiting scholar, and was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Award.