The IUPAP Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize has been established to recognize the contributions of Early Career Scientists who do interdisciplinary research that does not fit within a single subfield of physics as covered by one IUPAP Commission. The first issue of the award has been launched in 2023 inviting the nomination of candidates who do research that combines the subfields addressed by more than one IUPAP Commission, Affiliated Commission or Working Group. In the future we are planning to open the award for more widely diverse interdisciplinary types of research.
The call for nominations for the 2022 and 2023 IUPAP Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Awards are now closed.
Up to two winners will be considered for the prize (one for 2022 and one for 2023), which will be collectively presented at the General Assembly to be held in 2023. Each prize will consist of 1000 euro, a medal, and a certificate.
A decision on the awardees will be made at the meeting of the IUPAP Executive Council and Commission Chairs that is expected to be held in late September – early October 2023. The awardees will be notified afterwards.
IUPAP Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize 2022-2023
Evelyn Tang
For her development of new topological and geometrical analyses that reveal fundamental physics aspects which allow the characterization of robust emergent phenomena in complex systems, from quantum phases of matter to biological systems and the brain.
Evelyn Tang joined the faculty in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at Rice University, in 2021. Previously, she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and before that, an Africk Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the group of Dani Bassett. In 2015, she received her PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with Xiao-Gang Wen on novel topological states in quantum electronic systems. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BS from Yale University. Tang is a recipient of several awards including from NSF CAREER, Scialog, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation. She was previously a Simon-Berkeley Research Fellow and Gates Cambridge scholar.
Stefano Martiniani
For groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of the statistical mechanics of active and amorphous systems via the development of uniquely original approaches for quantifying order, entropy and entropy production in systems far from equilibrium, including granular and active matter, neural networks and biological systems.
Stefano Martiniani received his B.Sc. from Imperial College London in 2012, followed by an M.Phil. in Scientific Computing (2013) and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2017. He spent two years as a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Soft Matter Research, Department of Physics at NYU, and subsequently joined the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (2019-2021). Since 2022 he is an Assistant Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics at NYU. Prior awards include the Simons Foundation Faculty Fellowship, Gates Cambridge and St. John’s Benefactors scholarships, and outstanding Ph.D. thesis prize from the University of Cambridge. He is an NSF and NIH principal investigator.
