NSD researcher Heather Crawford has been elected a 2026 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), which recognizes advances in physics through original research and publications, and innovative contributions in the application of physics.
Crawford, the deputy project director for the Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA) and a senior staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division, where she leads the Low-Energy Nuclear Physics Program, is being recognized by the APS Division of Nuclear Physics for “experimental nuclear structure and reactions studies focused on neutron-rich exotic nuclei far from stability, and for the development of the experimental tools and systems required to enhance these measurements.”
Her primary research interests are the structure of exotic, short-lived nuclei and the instrumentation to perform these studies. She is deputy project director for GRETA, now in operation at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). She is completing the design of a liquid hydrogen target and detector array for use with GRETA, to enable higher luminosity measurements of the most neutron-rich nuclei. She performs experiments primarily at FRIB and at the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory, as well as at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF), a heavy-ion research facility operated by the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Japan.
