Beck honored with Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award

Douglas Beck, a professor in the Department of Physics, is the co-recipient of  the 2013 Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award from Jefferson Science Associates, LLC.

Beck will share the award with Paul Souder of Syracuse University. The joint recipients were selected for this honor for their leadership in the development of the use of parity-violating electron scattering as a tool for the study of nucleon and nuclear structure, and precision studies of the standard model. Jefferson Lab is a world-leading nuclear physics research laboratory managed and operated by Jefferson Science Associates for the U.S. Department of Energy.

“This award recognizes two outstanding nuclear physicists for leading distinctive and incisive physics programs at Jefferson Lab,” said JSA President and Jefferson Lab Director Hugh Montgomery. "Both Doug and Paul have also been enormously supportive of the entire Jefferson Lab enterprise. It should also be noted that there is an implicit tribute to the builders of the accelerator which has the special properties required by these particularly demanding experiments."

Beck, an Illinois faculty member since 1989, was the spokesperson for a collaboration of more than 100 researchers for the Jefferson Lab’s G0 electron scattering parity-violation experiment requiring the development of a new spectrometer which Beck oversaw from conception, to design, and commissioning at Illinois, to installation at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The collaboration is designed to elucidate a detailed spatial distribution of charge and current densities for strange quarks.

The Illinois group, under Beck's leadership, is responsible for the main instrumentation for the experiment, a superconducting toroidal spectrometer. The $2M magnet for the spectrometer was designed and tested at Illinois before being successfully installed at Jefferson Lab. The eight internal lead collimators for the magnet were also assembled and tested at Illinois.

Beck has been the recipient of awards including: Arnold T. Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Teaching, American Physical Society Fellow, University Scholar, NSF Young Investigator, and Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. He is the chair of the Brookhaven National Lab Nuclear and Particle Physics Advisory Committee and a current member of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics Executive Committee.

The JSA Outstanding Nuclear Physicist Award, established in 2011 and awarded biennially, recognizes an individual who has made outstanding and sustained contributions in experimental and/or theoretical research related to the nuclear physics program at the Jefferson Lab. The award is funded through the JSA Initiatives Fund Program and managed by the JSA Programs Committee. It will be presented at Jefferson Lab when it hosts its annual Users Group Meeting in May. The Users Group is comprised of those scientists from the U.S. and abroad who use Jefferson Lab’s facilities to conduct experiments.

The panel charged with making the selection for this year’s award was chaired by June Mathews, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and included David Ernst, Vanderbilt University; John Hardy, Texas A&M; Robert McKeown, deputy director for Science and Technology, Jefferson Lab; Witold Nazarecwicz, University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Lab, and; Elizabeth Lawson, SURA chief governance officer and principal
JSA/JLab liaison.

The award will be presented to Beck and Souder during a ceremony to be held at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, VA.
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Contact: Douglas Beck, Department of Physics, 217/244-7994.

Siv Schwink, Department of Physics, 217/552-5671.

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.