IUPAP Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize 2024-2025
Julia Wiktor
For her interdisciplinary work at the interface of computational condensed matter physics, semiconductor physics and materials chemistry. She has provided novel insights into carrier dynamics, defect energetics, and spectroscopic signatures in complex semiconductors, directly contributing to development of better materials for solar energy conversion, photocatalysis and water splitting.
Julia Wiktor joined the Department of Physics in Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden in 2019 and is currently an Associate Professor and leads a group there. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland from 2015 to 2018. During 2012-2015 she was at CEA Cadarache and Université Aix-Marseille in France where she had completed her Ph.D. She had received her undergraduate education in Poland.
Mattia Serra
For his interdisciplinary research which combines theoretical physics, fluid dynamics, and biology to develop a predictive framework for coherent structures in fluid flows, with numerous applications ranging from ocean search and rescue operations to embryonic development, which have been validated by experiments.
Mattia Serra joined the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego in the USA in 2020 and is an Assistant Professor there. Prior to that he was Postdoctoral Schmidt Science Fellow at the Harvard University in USA from 2017 to 2020. During 2014-2017, he completed his Ph.D from ETH, Zurich in Switzerland. He had received undergraduate education in Italy. Awards: ETH Medal Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis (2017), Schmidt Science Fellowship (2018), Hellman Fellowship in Physics (2023), Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Early Career Research Award (2024), NSF CAREER Award (2024), NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA R35) (2025).
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.
