IUPAP Early Career Prizes in History of Physics 2024 & 2025

The prize recognises outstanding contributions to the areas within the remit of the Commission. These include:

  • the history and philosophy of physics in any geographic region;
  • the history of physics in its experimental, instrumental, and theoretical forms;
  • the history of applied physics in industry and laboratory settings;
  • the history of astrophysics, biophysics, and allied disciplines;
  • the history of physics communities and physics diplomacy in a global context;
  • the history of physics within its social, cultural, and political contexts.
Early Career Prize for the History of Physics 2025

Barbara Hof 

The 2025 IUPAP Early Career Prize in the History of Physics recognizes Dr Barbara Hof’s scholarship building rich connections between the history of physics and histories of computing, education, international diplomacy, and political activism. The prize further recognizes Hof’s editorial and community-building activities.

Barbara Hof completed her PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2021, where her research focused on the motivations behind offering training programs at nuclear research laboratories during the Cold War and the reasons these programs were shared internationally. She currently holds a postdoctoral research position at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and serves as a guest lecturer at Leuphana University, Germany.

She has written several chapters and articles that explore the technical, social, political, and diplomatic dimensions of the history of physics. Her work includes studies on CERN’s history around 1970, notably an article examining why this multinational laboratory offered free public lectures on “science for all” to its staff, and a co-authored article on the protests at CERN during the Vietnam War. She has also conducted research on how the IUPAP Commission on High-Energy Physics (now: Commission on Particles and Fields) facilitated the expansion of East-West exchange and is now completing studies on the history of fusion science in Europe.

With a sustained interest in the intersection of science, technology, and international affairs, Barbara Hof is currently investigating data sharing practices in physics, thereby exploring why CERN became the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

Early Career Prize for the History of Physics 2024

Joanna Behrman

The 2024 IUPAP Early Career Prize in the History of Physics recognizes Dr Joanna Behrman’s pioneering research in the history of women in physics, alongside her extensive work communicating the history of physics to public audiences and extensive service and institution building on behalf of the history of physics community.
Joanna Behrman earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University in 2020. From 2020 to 2023 Joanna worked as a public historian at the American Institute of Physics. Since December 2024 she has been a postdoc at the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen under a fellowship from the Independent Research Foundation of Denmark. Joanna’s work lies at the intersection of the histories of physics, gender, and science education. She has shown how physics curricula has been tailored to women in the 19th and 20th century United States. Joanna has also recovered the stories of multiple female physicists and shown how the prevalent history of the physics profession has been gender-biased. She is currently working on a quantitative bipartite network analysis of historical women in physics. In addition, Joanna is writing a monograph on the history of U.S. women in physics, under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Early Career Prize for the History of Physics 2023

Dr. Jean-Phillipe Martinez

“For his insightful and diverse range of scholarly publications that combine the understanding of the development of physics concepts and mathematical formalism, the analysis of scientific practices in their local and institutional contexts, and transnational historical perspectives examining international channels of communication and science diplomacy.”

After completing a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Pau and the Adour Region in southwestern France, Jean-Philippe Martinez developed a growing interest in the history and philosophy of science, a discipline for which he received a Ph.D. from the Paris Diderot University (now Paris Cité) in 2017. His dissertation, dedicated to the Soviet physicist Vladimir Fock and his interpretation of the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, provided a new look at the influence of Marxist ideology on the work of Soviet physicists. It was also accompanied by important considerations on the processes of internationalization and scientific diplomacy of Soviet physics in the post-war period.

These investigations were pursued and extended during a postdoctoral period at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, with a particular focus on the debates on the interpretation of quantum mechanics in the Soviet Union and on the influence of the notion of antireductionism on the work of various Marxist physicists. Since August 2020, Jean-Philippe is a research assistant at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, as a postdoctoral member of the research unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider.” His research focuses on different developments in high-energy physics and more specifically on the concept of virtual particles.