URA

Astrophysicist Maria Vincenzi won the award for her thesis, which created a process for preventing Dark Energy Survey data from being thrown out due to contamination from unusable supernovae.

From URA.org (University Research Association), June 30, 2022: Matthew Portman’s research on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument was accepted by the URA’s Visiting Scholars Program Review Panel and was awarded funding to work at Fermilab where he worked with Dr. Antonella Palmese, a former Visiting Scholar herself. Portman’s curiosity for gravitational waves and coding knowledge allowed him to merge both physics and computer science while at Fermilab.

The astrophysicist won the 2022 Early Career Award from the Universities Research Association for her work on multi-probe data analysis for the Dark Energy Survey.

The physicist succeeds Marta Cehelsky, who has been at the helm of the Universities Research Association since 2011.

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.

After 10 years as executive director of Universities Research Association, Marta Cehelsky has announced her intent to step down in the latter part of this year.