The 2016 ATLAS Outstanding Achievement Awards ceremony was held at CERN on 20 October. Now in its third year, the awards give recognition to excellent contributions made to the collaboration, with an emphasis on activities carried out in the first year of Run 2.

“There are a lot of excellent, hard-working people in ATLAS, as displayed by the quality and quantity of the nominations we received,” said Stephen Haywood, Chairperson of the selection committee. “As such, the committee had to make many hard choices, as we tried to pick out the ‘outstanding’ from all the excellent work nominated.”

As in previous years, nominations came from across the collaboration, in areas such as technical coordination, detector systems, as well as activity areas including upgrade, combined performance and outreach. The Collaboration Board Chair Advisory Group examined each of the 62 nominations to make their final selections.

The first to receive their awards were Marcello Bindi (University of Göttingen), Laura Jeanty (Berkeley National Lab), Kerstin Lantzsch (University of Bonn), Karolos Potamianos (Berkeley National Lab) and Yosuke Takubo (KEK). They were celebrated for their outstanding contributions to the successful commissioning and operation of the Pixel Detector for the start-up of Run 2.

Dmitri Kharchenko (JINR), Uladzimir Kruchonak (JINR), Konstantin Levterov (JINR) and Enrico Pastori (University of Rome Tor Vergata and INFN) were celebrated for developing new techniques ensuring stable operation of the RPC gas system.

For his contribution to the operations and upgrade of the TileCal Detector Control System, ATLAS awarded Filipe Martins (Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP)).

For their outstanding contributions to ensuring the integrity of the Trigger during Run 2, the ATLAS Experiment presented awards to Ricardo Abreu (University of Oregon), Patrick Czodrowski (CERN), Carlos Barajas (University of Sussex), Joana Machado Miguens (University of Pennsylvania) and Mark Stockton (McGill University).

This year, in addition to awarding specific members of the collaboration, special recognition was also given to ATLAS and CERN groups. The ATLAS Magnet Team, CERN VSC (Vacuum, Surfaces & Coatings) Team, CERN Central Workshop and CERN Detectors Technology Operations Group were celebrated for their outstanding work on the vacuum bellows for the Endcap C Toroid.

For providing prompt data reconstruction at Tier 0, especially during the 2015 run, ATLAS awarded Magda Chelstowska (CERN) and Christian Ohm (Berkeley National Lab).

Attila Krasznahorkay (CERN) was given an award for his outstanding contributions to the development and implementation of the Run 2 analysis model, in particular the development of the xAOD.

And finally, Matthias Danninger (University of British Columbia) and Hideyuki Oide (University of Genoa and INFN) were celebrated for their outstanding contributions to the real-time tracking of the Insertable B-Layer alignment.