Several Postdocs and students in NSD’s Relativistic Nuclear Collisions (RNC) program have recently won awards and fellowships:
Lipei Du, a UC Berkeley Postdoc and affiliate in the RNC program, received a 2025 RHIC/AGS Merit Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the RHIC scientific program.
Provakar Datta, an RNC Postdoc, was awarded the Jefferson Science Associates (JSA) Thesis Prize for his PhD work at the University of Connecticut. As a student, Provakar moved to Jefferson Lab in
2021 and was instrumental in preparing the Super BigBite Spectrometer (SBS) package to enable the first SBS experiments – a precision measurement of the neutron’s magnetic form factor,GMn, that more than doubled the kinematic range of such measurements.
RNC-affiliated Postdocs Minjung Kim and Florian Jonas were awarded prestigious CERN fellowships which will begin September 1st. Minjung, a postdoc at UC Berkeley with the RNC group, has made significant contributions to studies of Ultra-Peripheral Collisions (UPCs) in ALICE and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Florian Jonas, also a postdoc at UC Berkeley, worked with the RNC group on ALICE photon measurements and within the XSCAPE Collaboration.
A recent article in the journal Nature reported on the direct measurement of nobelium at the 88-Inch Cyclotron. This is the first time an element with more than 99 protons has been measured directly using an atom-at-a-time technique. The paper, which was led by NSD Research Scientist Jennifer Pore, also presents a comparison between nobelium (element 102) and actinium (element 89), an analysis which provides new insights into how elements at the extremes of the actinide series interact within the same experiment. Further details of this work, the novel methods which were used to produce and measure nobelium, and ongoing NSD research in the physics and chemistry of superheavy elements can be found in this article.
In May, several members of NSD attended the International Nuclear Physics Conference (INPC 2025) in Daejon, Korea. Rodney Orford, Heather Crawford, Marilena Lykiardopoulou (Low Energy Nuclear Physics program), Joanna Szornel, and Ren Cooper (Applied Nuclear Physics program) all gave oral presentations, and several members of the group also chaired sessions.
The 2025 Symposium on Radiation Measurements and Applications (SORMA West) was held on the campus of UC Berkeley in July. Several members of NSD staff including Ren Cooper, Joanna Szornel, Carol Chien, Weronika Wolszczak (Applied Nuclear Physics program), and Tom Gallant (Division Deputy, Operations) were involved in organizing the event and many other members of the Division attended, presented talks and posters, and chaired sessions. The conference showcased the latest developments in radiation detection for basic and applied science and was attended by approximately 225 individuals from eight countries.
NSD has established an Outreach Committee. The committee is charged with reviewing current outreach efforts, and developing and implementing recommendations to improve NSD outreach efforts. The committee is chaired by Alan Poon (Neutrinos program) and has as its members Shamsu Basunia (Nuclear Data program), Raul Briceno (Nuclear Theory program), Michael Johnson (88” Operations), David Konyndyk (Division), Shujie Li (Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program), Jennifer Pore (Low Energy Nuclear Physics program), Emil Rofors (Applied Nuclear Physics program), Joanna Szornel (Applied Nuclear Physics program).
NSD welcomes Alec Lindman, a new Postdoc in the Neutrinos program.
