News: Awards

Vitelli honored for his innovative research reimagining possibilities of unconventional materials.

This year’s Golded Goose Award honorees turned coffee stains, holiday lights, and a noisy ultrasound experiment into breakthroughs in physics, disaster response, and cancer treatment.

Award by Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation honors high-risk, multi-field leap across quantum, biology, and chemistry.

Congratulations to the Physics faculty members who have received NSF CAREER Awards. According to the NSF, the prestigious CAREER award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Young-Kee Kim, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute, has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.

Congratulations to the PSD community members who have been recognized with 2026 Frontiers of Science Awards. Michael Levin, Professor in Physics and the JFI, and Physics alum Carolyn Zhang, PhD'23, are recognized for the field of condensed matter physics. Yoav Afik, a postdoctoral scholar in the EFI who works on the ATLAS experiment, is recognized for research in particle physics phenomenology.

This year, eight PSD instructors and students have been honored for excellence in teaching the next generation of physical and mathematical scientists.

Physicist Clay Córdova has been named a recipient of the 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize for his work in quantum field theory.
The New Horizons prize, which is given to early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields, includes an award of $100,000.

The largest neutrino experiment in the United States was named the Project of the Year by the Underground Construction Association for completing a significant and challenging underground construction project with little or no issues.

Kamionkowski is known for his early work on the possibility that dark matter could be composed of elementary particles and his more recent work on the hypothesis of dark matter being made up of black holes.

Congratulations to early-career scholars Aloni Cohen (Computer Science and DSI), Anna Wuttig (Chemistry), and Zoe Yan (Physics), recognized for their potential to make substantial contributions to their fields.