On 27 March, during the 30th edition of the Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects workshop (DIS2023) held in Michigan, Adinda de Wit and Yong Zhao received the 2023 Guido Altarelli Awards for experiment and theory. The prizes, named after CERN’s Guido Altarelli, who made seminal contributions to QCD, recognise exceptional achievements from young scientists in deep-inelastic scattering and related subjects.
CMS collaborator Adinda de Wit (University of Zurich) was awarded the experimental prize for her achievements in understanding the nature of the Higgs boson, including precision studies of its couplings and decay channels. She received her PhD from Imperial College London, then took up a postdoc position at DESY followed by the University of Zurich and is presently at LLR. Co-convener of the CMS Higgs physics analysis group and past co-convener of the CMS Higgs combination and properties group, de Wit also received the Herta-Sponer-Prize by the German Physical Society.
Yong Zhao (Argonne National Laboratory) was awarded the theory prize for fundamental contributions to ab initio calculations of parton distributions in lattice QCD. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland, and then held postdoc positions at Brookhaven and MIT before joining Argonne laboratory as an assistant physicist. Yong also received the 2022 Kenneth G. Wilson Award for Excellence in Lattice Field Theory for fundamental contributions to calculations of parton physics on lattice.
During the award ceremony, Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi joined in via Zoom to reminisce about his collaboration with Altarelli. Together they contributed to QCD evolution equations for parton densities, known as the Altarelli-Parisi or DGLAP equations.
The DIS series covers a large spectrum of topics in high-energy physics. One part of the conference is devoted to the most recent results from large experiments at Brookhaven, CERN, DESY, Fermilab, Jlab and KEK, as well as corresponding theoretical advances. The workshop demonstrated how DIS and related subjects permeate a broad range of physics topics from hadron colliders to spin physics, neutrino physics and more. The next workshop will be held in Grenoble, France from 8-12 April 2024.
