Session SA: Awards Ceremony

Mentoring: At the heart of the nuclear (physics) family

I have been privileged to have had mentors who fostered my success as a physics student and my entry into research in experimental nuclear physics. They provided encouragement and support throughout my path towards a career in nuclear physics research, higher education and service to the research and academic communities. I feel that I have built on these mentoring models by reaching out to college and graduate students, recognizing their high potential for success, encouraging them to identify their passions, and helping them to foster their paths towards success. I am proud when I see my former students, postdocs and more junior colleagues excel in mentoring current and future generations of students and early career scientists. This presentation will tell the story of how my mentors were role models who fostered my success, my interactions with my own students and postdocs in helping them to realize their passions, and my passion for discussing with students from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and scientific interests how to prepare for graduate studies and future careers.   

The Inner Workings of the Quark-Gluon Plasma Studied with Highly Energetic Jets

In collisions between relativistically accelerated lead ions a dense medium is formed: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). These type of collisions are used to study matter in phases where quarks and gluons are no more confined into hadrons and where chiral symmetry is restored. Hard scattered partons are used to map out the properties of the QGP. As a parton passes through the QCD medium, induced energy loss from elastic and radiative interactions leads to a modification of the parton shower; this modification is used to deduce medium properties. In this talk, jet measurements in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider are discussed. In particular the use of jet substructures to study specific properties of hot QCD matter will be presented.   

Effective Field Theory Truncation Errors and Why They Matter

All models are wrong, but some are useful. Still fewer are wrong in a way that is useful. I will discuss how---through a Bayesian formalism---effective field theories (EFTs) are not only powerful predictive tools, but also contain the ingredients necessary to estimate their own imperfection. Applications of this formalism are discussed, including its impact on the design of experiments, and uncertainty quantification for the nuclear matter equation of state.