2021 APS Fall Prize and Award Recipients

APS announces the recipients of prizes and awards for achievements in fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, and plasma physics.

July 30, 2021

Prize and award recipients are nominated by their peers and colleagues and were selected from hundreds of nominees. Recipients of APS Prizes and Awards are announced in two groups, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. The list of Fall recipients appears below.

The Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of fluid dynamics.

“For developing a novel theoretical and computational framework which established fundamental insights into the turbulent bubble breakup cascade in oceanic breaking waves.”

• Wai Hong Ronald Chan, University of Colorado Boulder

The Stanley Corrsin Award recognizes a particularly influential contribution to fundamental fluid dynamics.

“For development, exposition, and combined application of computational and modal decomposition tools to understand coherent structures in turbulent flows and for continuing leadership in aeroacoustics and turbulence.”

• Tim Colonius, California Institute of Technology

The Fluid Dynamics Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in fluid dynamics research.

“For seminal contributions to wetting of surfaces and interfacial hydrodynamics by revealing the physics of the phenomena through reduction to their simple core.”

• David Quéré, ESPCI-Paris

The Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics honors an outstanding early career experimentalist in nuclear physics.

“For excellence in experimental research into the fundamental nature of matter and mass based on low-energy cryogenic detection techniques, in particular neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter searches.”

• Danielle H. Speller, Johns Hopkins University

The John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research focuses specifically on achievements in plasma physics research.

“For developing Monte Carlo methods that overcome the fermion sign problem, leading to the first ab initio data for an electron gas under warm dense matter conditions.”

• Travis Sjostrom, Los Alamos National Laboratory 
• Fionn D. Malone, QC Ware
• Tim Schoof, DESY
• Simon Groth, Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel
• Tobias Dornheim, Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS)
• Michael Bonitz, Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Kiel University
• William Matthew Colwyn Foulkes, Imperial College London

The James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics recognizes outstanding contributions to plasma physics broadly.

“For ground-breaking discoveries in space plasma physics and for seminal theoretical contributions to understanding space plasma processes and magnetohydrodynamics.”

• Margaret Galland Kivelson, UCLA: Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences

The Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award goes to a young plasma physicist who has performed original thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement.

“For pioneering the development of adjoint methods and application of shape calculus for fusion plasmas, enabling a new derivative-based method of stellarator design.”

• Elizabeth Paul, Princeton University

The Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research recognizes contributions to plasma physics research by early career physicists.

“For groundbreaking contributions and scientific leadership in the understanding of non-axisymmetric magnetic fields and relativistic electrons in tokamak plasmas.”

• Carlos Paz-Soldan, Columbia University

For more information on the recipients, please visit the APS Honors webpage at aps.org/programs/honors/.