award

A large telescope on a rooftop, the sunset behind it

Sloan Digital Sky Survey received the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award for its “early and influential demonstration of the power of data science to transform a scientific domain.” The award recognized the contributions of Fermilab’s Bill Boroski, Steve Kent and Brian Yanny, as well as several others, for work done from 2000 to 2008 on the database systems developed to distribute SDSS data.

Fermilab physicist and Muon g-2 co-spokesperson Chris Polly has won a Falling Walls Award in physical sciences, which honors researchers doing groundbreaking work in the observation and understanding of natural phenomena of the earth, atmosphere and space. Polly is being recognized for his contribution to the Muon g-2 collaboration. Its results earlier this year strengthened evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. He is also a finalist for Science Breakthrough of the Year 2021 in physical sciences.

Scientist and 2021 URA Early Career Award winner stands at a chalkboard working on equations.

Fermilab’s Pedro Machado has won the 2021 Universities Research Association Early Career Award for his theoretical work on neutrino science that helps experimentalists with novel search strategies and scientific questions worth exploring.

The annual Universities Research Association Thesis Award recognizes outstanding work for a thesis conducted at or in collaboration with Fermilab. Zhang’s winning Ph.D. dissertation included insights into both physics searches and equipment upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS detector. Fermilab serves as the U.S. hub for CMS.

Portrait of a man with dark hair and a short beard and mustache wearing glasses, a brown corduroy jacket, a red and blue plaid shirt. His hands are interlaced on the table in front of him. In the lower left corner, the keyboard of a laptop peeks out. He is in front of a starry background.

What if human analysis, combined with machine learning, could advance the study of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Fermilab scientist Brian Nord a $2.5 million Early Career Research Award to explore that possibility. Nord has envisioned a new hybrid data-analysis method to undertake the project. It integrates the strengths of artificial intelligence and interpretations of statistics in ways that could potentially advance the studies of cosmology.