B. Jacak Awarded Bonner Prize

Former NSCL graduate student Barbara Jacak has been awarded the 2019 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics by the American Physical Society.  The Bonner Prize is awarded annually to recognize and encourage outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics.  Barbara Jacak received the Bonner Prize “For her leadership in the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon plasma, in particular for her contributions to the PHENIX experiment and its explorations of jets as probes.”

Barbara Jacak received her Ph.D. from MSU for her research at NSCL in 1984 working under the supervision of Prof. Gary Westfall.  Her thesis was entitled “Fragment Production in Intermediate Energy Heavy Ion Reactions”.  The experiments carried out included the measurement of light particle spectra with 1 £ A £ 14 from Ar+Ca, Ar+Au, Ne+Au, and Ne+Al reactions at 43, 92, 137, and 156 AMeV.  These results were compared with hydrodynamic and cascade model calculations as well as quantum statistical and coalescence models.

Barbara Jacak continued her career after MSU as a J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and later as a staff scientist there.  In 1997, she joined Stony Brook University as a professor and led the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group working with the PHENIX Collaboration at RHIC.  In 2006, Barbara Jacak was elected as the spokesperson of the PHENX Collaboration at RHIC.  Barbara Jacak was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Science in 2009.  Barbara Jacak became the Director of the Nuclear Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2015.

Congratulations to Barbara for winning the 2019 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics!