Awards

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist Yuan Shi has earned the American Physical Society’s Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis award for his work in plasma physics. Shi’s thesis, entitled “Plasma Physics in Strong Field Regimes,” was conducted at Princeton University. His award is cited “for elegantly describing three-wave coupling in plasma modified by oblique magnetic fields, identifying applications including plasma-based laser amplifiers and adapting quantum field theory to describe plasma physics in the strong-field regime.”


The award recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in plasma physics.


Three scientists from Lawrence Livermore, Hye-Sook Park, Steven Ross, and Dmitri Ryutov, are recipients of the 2020 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society. The honor recognizes a recent outstanding achievement in plasma physics research. 


The scientists are part of an international team of researchers that was cited “for generating Weibel-mediated collisionless shocks in the laboratory, impacting a broad range of energetic astrophysical scenarios, plasma physics, and experiments using high energy and high-power lasers conducted at basic plasma science facilities.” 


The award recognizes nearly a decade of the team’s work in frontier laboratory astrophysics, encompassing plasma physics theory, large-scale numerical simulations and experiments on some of the world’s premier high-energy laser facilities, including Livermore’s National Ignition Facility.


SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, recently announced the election of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory research engineer Richard Leach as a senior member of the organization. The designation honors Leach for his technical and scientific contributions to a variety of optics and photonics fields, including seismic detection, satellite communications, medical devices, first responders, homeland security, and large high-power laser systems. SPIE recognizes senior members based on exceptional professional experience, active involvement with the optics community, and/or significant performance that sets them apart from their peers, according to the organization.