IUPAP Awards Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP)[1] today announced the award of its very first Young Scientist Prizes in Particle Physics. The awards have been made to Yasaman Farzan of the Institute for research in fundamental sciences (IPM), Tehran, and Kai-Feng Chen of the National Taiwan University, Taipei.

Yasaman Farzan is awarded the prize for her highly regarded theoretical contributions to neutrino and lepton physics. She has made several innovative conjectures, such as the measurement of CP-violation in the lepton sector, exploration of possible symmetries to predict CP-violation, the extraction of neutrino mixing parameters from high energy neutrinos, the study of neutrino effects in electric dipole moments of leptons and supernova cooling processes involving new weakly interacting particles. Many of her predictions will be addressed by future experiments in neutrino and lepton physics. Yasaman Farzan completed her Ph.D. in 2004 at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy. Part of her thesis work was carried out during a long-term visit to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Sector (SLAC) in California. After graduation she took a position at IPM, Tehran, where she started to build a phenomenology group in Particle Physics in Iran. Currently Yasaman Farzan is an Assistant Professor at IPM.

Kai-Feng Chen is recognized for his creative and innovative contributions to the analysis of B-meson decays with the BELLE experiment at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. Among them was the very important measurement of time-dependent CP violation in b to s transitions and polarization measurements in B-decays. His contributions resulted in highly cited publications of the Belle experiment. Kai-Feng Chen has studied at the National Taiwan University and completed his PhD in 2005. Most of his research has been done at KEK with the BELLE experiment. Recently Kai-Feng Chen started a new research project with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva.

With both awards we start the new series of the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize,” said Gregor Herten, Chair of IUPAP’s Commission on particles and fields and Head of the prize committee. “We have received nominations for many excellent candidates, therefore the task of the prize committee has been quite difficult, but we are very satisfied to award the prize to two outstanding and promising young scientists.”

The IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics was recently established by IUPAP to recognize the scientific achievements of outstanding young experimental and theoretical particle physicists. Two prizes are awarded every two years, preferentially one to a theoretical particle physicist and the other to an experimental particle physicist. 2008 is the inaugural year for the prize. The Commission on Particles and Fields (C11) of IUPAP acts as the prize selection committee.

Each winner will receive an IUPAP medal, a certificate citing their scientific achievement and a small cash award. Presentations will be made at the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics , Philadelphia, PA, USA, July 30th - August 5th, 2008.