The ATLAS Collaboration celebrated the achievements of its exceptional PhD students at the recent Thesis Awards ceremony. Established in 2010, the ATLAS Thesis Awards recognize the remarkable contributions made by students to the ATLAS Collaboration through their doctoral theses. Students play pivotal roles in the collaboration while gaining invaluable skills crucial to their professional pursuits.

On 15 February 2024, the 2023 ATLAS Thesis Awards were announced at a ceremony held at CERN's main auditorium. The award winners are: Joshua Beirer from CERN & Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany), Prajita Bhattarai from Brandeis University (USA), Savannah Clawson from the University of Manchester (UK), Hassnae El Jarrari from Université Mohammed-V De Rabat (Morocco), Nicole Hartman from Stanford University & SLAC (USA), Samuel Van Stroud from University College London (UK), and Xiao Yang from the University of Science and Technology of China (China).

"PhD students aren’t just the beating heart of the ATLAS Collaboration – they’re the brains behind many of our achievements,” said Antonella De Santo, Chair of the Thesis Awards Committee. “PhD students make up a significant fraction of ATLAS Collaboration members and contribute to a diverse range of research areas, including physics analysis, detector operations and upgrades, and software and hardware developments. The ATLAS Thesis Awards are our way of recognizing and highlighting their outstanding achievements."

During the ceremony, each winner had the opportunity to present a brief overview of their thesis work, discussing the results of their physics analyses, their technical contributions to ATLAS, and the creative solutions they employed to overcome challenges. As per tradition, these presentations were also a chance for the winners to thank the colleagues, friends and family members whose support was instrumental to their academic journey.

"Every year, the Award Committee is blown away by the calibre of the nominations we receive, which reflects the exceptional talent present throughout the ATLAS Collaboration,” Antonella said. “On behalf of the Awards Committee, I extend heartfelt congratulations to the winners, who were selected from a pool of highly accomplished PhD graduates. Their contributions not only advance the goals of ATLAS but also enrich the broader particle-physics community."

Explore the winning theses:

• Joshua Beirer: Novel Approaches to the Fast Simulation of the ATLAS Calorimeter and Performance Studies of Track-Assisted Reclustered Jets for Searches for Resonant X → SH → bbWW* Production with the ATLAS Detector
• Prajita Bhattarai: Standard Model Electroweak Precision Measurements with two Z bosons and two jets in ATLAS
• Savannah Clawson: The light at the end of the tunnel gets weaker: Observation and measurement of photon-induced W+W− production at the ATLAS Experiment
• Hassnae El Jarrari: Dark Photon Searches from Higgs Boson and Heavy Boson Decays Using pp Collisions Recorded at 13 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC and Performance Evaluation of the Low Gain Avalanche Detectors for the HL-LHC ATLAS High-Granularity Timing Detector
• Nicole Hartman: A Search for Non-Resonant HH → 4b at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector -- or -- 2b, and then another 2b... now that's the thesis question
• Samuel Van Stroud: Graph Neural Network Flavour Tagging and Boosted Higgs Measurements at the LHC
• Xiao Yang: Measurement of VH(H→WW∗) process in ATLAS and development of radiation hard LGAD ATLAS