Clemson Physics and Astronomy alumna, Emily Thompson (B.S., 2016) has received an award for her Ph.D. thesis from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. After graduating from Clemson, Thompson enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Her dissertation focused on the search for long-lived supersymmetric particles. Her work represents the first attempt to search for such particles using the ATLAS detector.
The ATLAS Collaboration is a vast technological and human undertaking, consisting of more than 5,500 people in over 180 institutions all around the world. Nearly a fifth of the collaboration members are Ph.D. students. A dedicated committee selects up to six awards every year to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations within the collaboration.
“Emily was a fantastic Ph.D. student, and thus I am not surprised that ATLAS awarded this competitive prize to her!” says Thompson’s supervisor, DESY Research Director Beate Heinemann.
Thompson’s award-winning Ph.D. research helped her earn a coveted Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. “Dr. Thompson was one of our most outstanding students,” remarks CU Physics and Astronomy Chair, Dr. Sean Brittain, “As a department, we are committed to integrating research with education to help our students reach their goals. Seeing her continue to excel at the highest level in physics is incredibly gratifying.”
The Department of Physics and Astronomy congratulates Dr. Thompson, and we look forward to following her promising career!
Adapted from: https://www.desy.de/news/news_search/index_eng.html?openDirectAnchor=2589&two_columns=0
DESY Particle Physics Director, Beate Heinemann.
