By Brookhaven National Laboratory
Friday, July 22, 2011
Stony Brook University Student Wins 2011
Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize
June 23, 2011
Accompanying the 2011 Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize winner,
Stony Brook University (SBU) student Megan Connors, and her
advisor, SBU Distinguished Professor Barbara Jacak (center, both
holding the award certificate) are (from left) Loralie Smart, Aimee
Sumereau, Kathy Walker, Brookhaven Women in Science board members;
Anne Sickles, BNL assistant physicist and former Goldhaber Prize
winner; and BNL board members Carla Vale, Linda Bowerman, and
Vinita Ghosh.
UPTON, NY — Megan Connors, a Stony Brook University (SBU)
graduate student, has been awarded the 2011 Gertrude
Scharff-Goldhaber Prize, consisting of $1,000 and a framed
certificate. Currently funded by Brookhaven Science Associates, the
company that manages Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S.
Department of Energy, the award was established in 1992 by
Brookhaven Women in Science (BWIS), a nonprofit organization that
supports and encourages the advancement of women in science.
The award recognizes substantial promise and accomplishment by
women graduate students in physics who are performing their thesis
research at Brookhaven Lab, or who are enrolled at SBU. It
commemorates the outstanding contributions of the late nuclear
physicist Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber. In 1950, she became the first
woman Ph.D. physicist appointed to the Brookhaven Lab staff. She
also was a founding member of BWIS.
Connors earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2005, and she expects to
earn a Ph.D. in physics from SBU this summer. She is performing her
research at the PHENIX detector, one of two large detectors at
Brookhaven Lab’s world-class accelerator, the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider. Specifically, she gathers and interprets data
from PHENIX, which probes the quark-gluon plasma, the type of
matter that is thought to have existed just microseconds after the
Big Bang. After she earns her Ph.D., Connors plans to continue
studying the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions as a
postdoctoral fellow.
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