The American Physical Society has announced that Nadya Mason, assistant professor of physics, will receive the Society’s 2012 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, “For innovative experiments that elucidate the electronic interactions and correlations in low-dimensional systems, in particular the use of the local gates and tunnel probes to control and measure the electronic states in carbon nanotubes and graphene.”
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The American Physical Society has announced that Nadya Mason, assistant professor of physics, will receive the Society’s 2012 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, “For innovative experiments that elucidate the electronic interactions and correlations in low-dimensional systems, in particular the use of the local gates and tunnel probes to control and measure the electronic states in carbon nanotubes and graphene.”
Nadya Mason adjusting a cryostat in her laboratory in the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory,
“Nadya is a remarkable young experimentalist who works at the intersection of complex materials, superconductivity, and nanotechnology,” said Dale J. Van Harlingen, head of the Department of Physics. “She has superb technical skills and excellent taste in selecting important and timely problems and has already made pioneering contributions to the physics and electronic properties of carbon nanotubes and transport in low-dimensional systems at the quantum limit.”
Mason received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1995 and her doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 2001. She returned to Harvard for postdoctoral training, where she was elected junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. She joined the faculty at Illinois in 2005.
Her achievements have previously been recognized by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2007), a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (2008), the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award of the Anita Borg Institute (2009), and a fellowship in the UI Center for Advanced Study (2011).
The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award recognizes outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career. In addition to a cash prize, the Award provides travel support for the recipient to present a series of public lectures in the spirit of Maria Goeppert Mayer, recipient of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for her development of a mathematical model describing the nuclear shell structure of the atomic nucleus. Goeppert Mayer was the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie.
Mason will receive her award at a special session of the American Physical Society’s annual meeting in Boston in March 2012.
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Contact:Nadya Mason, Department of Physics, 217/244-9114.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.