Among the more than 5500 members of the ATLAS Collaboration, PhD students play a vital role in advancing the experiment while pursuing their degrees. Every year, the ATLAS Thesis Awards celebrate their outstanding achievements, recognising the significant impact of their research on physics analyses, detector advancements, and software development.

On 20 February 2025, CERN’s main auditorium hosted the 2024 ATLAS Thesis Awards, celebrating the next generation of leading researchers. This year’s recipients were: Christian Appelt from Humboldt University (Germany), Ana Luisa Moreira de Carvalho from Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto Superior Técnico and Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (Portugal), Shalini Epari from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), Emily Ann Smith from the University of Chicago (USA), Kaito Sugizaki from the University of Tokyo (Japan), Martino Tanasini from Università di Genova (Italy), Aric Tate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), and Makayla Vessella from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA).

“The ATLAS Thesis Awards not only recognise the dedication and excellence of our early-career researchers but also underscore the critical role they play in advancing the experiment’s scientific mission,” said Jean-François Arguin, Chair of the 2024 Thesis Awards Committee. “This year’s submissions were of an exceptional standard, reflecting the depth and breadth of research within ATLAS. We are delighted to celebrate the outstanding achievements of the winners.”

During the award ceremony, each winner presented a brief overview of their thesis work, highlighting their contributions to detector technology and data analysis. The winners also took a moment to reflect on their journey as PhD students, acknowledging the challenges they overcame, the skills they developed, and the mentors, peers, and family members who supported them along the way.

The achievements of these students are a testament to their dedication and the collaborative spirit of ATLAS. As Jean-François Arguin highlighted: “Each thesis represents years of rigorous research and a meaningful contribution to the ongoing success of the ATLAS Experiment. On behalf of the Awards Committee, I extend my congratulations to the winners and look forward to seeing their continued impact on the field of particle physics.”

Explore the winning theses:

• Christian Appelt: Extending the limits in the hunt for long-lived heavy neutral leptons with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
• Ana Luisa Carvalho: Measurements of Higgs boson properties in associated production with top quarks with the ATLAS detector
• Shalini Epari: What to expect when you are expecting new physics: searches for new phenomena in multilepton final states with the ATLAS detector
• Emily Ann Smith: A Global View of Jets With the ATLAS Detector: From Hardware Triggers to Precision Measurements and Beyond
• Kaito Sugizaki: Search for higgsinos with compressed mass spectra in final states with low-momentum leptons using 140 fb^-1 of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV
• Martino Tanasini: The Higgs, the Beauty and the Charm: Improving Jet Flavour-Tagging and Higgs Boson Measurements with Graph Neural Networks in the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC
• Aric Tate: Investigations of Initial State Effects in p+Pb Collisions via Dijet Measurement with the ATLAS Detector
• Makayla Vessella: Do Dibosons Dream of Semileptonic Sheep? Searching for heavy Wh resonances and optimizing track reconstruction with the ATLAS detector