LHCb Early Career Scientist Awards
On 15 September 2016, the LHCb collaboration awarded the first set of prizes for outstanding contributions of early career scientists.
From left to right: Guy Wilkinson (LHCb spokesperson), Sascha Stahl, Kevin Dungs, Tim Head, Roel Aaij, Conor Fitzpatrick, Claire Prouvé, Patrick Koppenburg (chair of committee) and Sean Benson.
Twenty-five nominations were submitted and considered by the committee, and 5 prizes were awarded to teams or individuals for works that had a significant impact within the last year.
The awardees are:
- Roel Aaij, Sean Benson, Conor Fitzpatrick, Rosen Matev and Sascha Stahl for having implemented and commissioned the revolutionary changes to the LHC Run-2 high-level-trigger, including the first widespread deployment of real-time analysis techniques in High Energy Physics;
- Kevin Dungs and Tim Head for having launched the Starterkit initiative, a new style of software tutorials based on modern programming methods. “Starterkit is a group of physicists who want to improve the working lives of young researchers working on the LHCb experiment” (https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit/);
- Manuel Schiller for speed improvements in the tracking of LHCb, enabling the full event reconstruction in the HLT. Manuel used advanced numerical methods to provide mathematical tools that speed up the tracking by large factors;
- Claire Prouvé for the development of the automated RICH mirror alignment within the Online framework. Claire's work has ultimately led to RICH mirror alignment taking 20mins to complete, compared to many days which it took before;
- Paolo Durante for the development of the PCIe40 board, the corner-stone of the LHCb upgrade. Paolo's contributions were crucial to demonstrate the overall superiority of the PCIe40 based-architecture, which made the LHCb upgrade technically possible, with a solution that is significantly less expensive than the original plan.
by Patrick Koppenburg for the LHCb Collaboration
