The ATLAS Collaboration held the 7th Outstanding Achievement Awards Ceremony on 20 June 2024. These biennial awards recognize the invaluable technical work performed across the Collaboration in various fields.

The awards received an impressive 116 nominations, each meticulously evaluated with input from expert groups in each category by the ATLAS Collaboration Board Chair Advisory Group, serving as the Awards Committee. This year, the Committee honoured 2 individuals and 7 groups for their exceptional contributions to detector operation, upgrade, software, computing and combined performance during the period from February 2022 to October 2023.

“The Outstanding Achievement Awards recognize but a part of the extensive efforts made across the ATLAS Collaboration,” acknowledged Ricardo Goncalo, co-chair of the Awards Committee. “Selecting the ‘outstanding’ from the many high-quality nominations we received was a challenge.”

“The work of the awardees demanded great creativity and determination,” said Sarah Demers, co-chair of the Awards Committee. “Not only were their contributions crucial during this recent data-taking period, they also set the stage for high-quality physics analyses and operations in the years to come.”

This year’s award ceremony took place at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, as part of the ATLAS Collaboration Week meeting. Awardees, based in institutes around the world, participated in the ceremony both in person and remotely. Each recipient was honoured with a plaque to celebrate their remarkable contributions.

Here are the 2024 ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Award recipients:

Luca Canali (CERN)
For outstanding contributions to the ATLAS database infrastructure.

Jackson Barr (University College London), Alexander Froch (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), Philipp Gadow (CERN), Dan Guest (Humboldt University Berlin), Nilotpal Kakati (Weizmann Institute of Science), Dmitrii Kobylianskii (Weizmann Institute of Science), Nikita Ivvan Pond (University College London), Samuel Van Stroud (University College London)
For outstanding contributions to heavy flavour tagging algorithms based on Graph Neural Networks.

Liang Guan (Michigan), Ioannis Mesolongitis (University of West Attica), Michelle Solis (University of Arizona), Aaron White (Harvard University)
For understanding the problem of randomly dropping e-links in the NSW and for finding a very effective mitigation for this problem.

Jakub Kremer (DESY), Agnieszka Ogrodnik (Charles University), Martin Rybar (Charles University)
For outstanding contributions to the Heavy Ions operation and trigger.

Koji Nakamura (KEK), Hideyuki Oide (KEK), Manabu Togawa (KEK)
For outstanding contributions to the ITk Pixel project in sensor production, hybridisation and module assembly.

Johannes Junggeburth (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Patrick Scholer (Carleton University)
For outstanding contributions to the Run 3 muon software.

Sara Alderweireldt (University of Edinburgh), Rafal Bielski (University of Oregon), Francesco Giuli (CERN), Ralf Gugel (University of Mainz), Claudia Merlassino (University of Udine), Stefanie Morgenstern (CERN), Gabriel Palacino (Indiana University), Aleksandra Poreba (CERN), Antonia Strubig (Stockholm University), Daniele Zanzi (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
For outstanding contributions to the Trigger operation.

Julien Maurer (Bucharest IFIN-HH)
For outstanding contributions to the ATLAS prompt reconstruction operation.

Anthony Affolder (UC Santa Cruz), Ian Dyckes (Berkeley LBNL), Vitaliy Fadeyev (UC Santa Cruz), Cole Helling (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Jacob Wayne Johnson (UC Santa Cruz), Matthew Kurth (Beijing IHEP), Masahiro Morii (Harvard University), Peter Phillips (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), Luise Poley (TRIUMF), Craig Sawyer (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)
For outstanding contributions to the identification of the vibrational source of cold noise on ITk Strip modules.