Chun Shen, who received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in August 2014, working under the guidance of Prof. Ulrich Heinz, has been awarded the 2016 Dissertation Award of the Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) of the American Physical Society  for his thesis "The standard model for relativistic heavy-ion collisions and electromagnetic tomography,"(http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?last_nm=Shen&first_nm=Chun&year=2016). One such award is given each year; it consists of $2,500 and an allowance for travel to the 2015 DNP Fall Meeting in Santa Fe, where he will talk about his work and the award will be presented. The citation for the award reads ”For his successful prediction of anisotropic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC, his elucidation of the `direct photon flow puzzle', and his contributions to the development of a computational tool of viscous fluid dynamics enabling precision studies of relativistic heavy-ion collisions.” According to the chair of the selection committee, “the committee had a difficult job making the selection, given the large number of impressive nominees. Chun Shen’s dissertation and impact were judged to be outstanding.” 

Chun Shen is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University where he uses the theoretical framework developed in his PhD thesis to extract the transport property of the QGP, namely shear and bulk viscosities and the heat conductivity, to understand the underlying many-body interactions in strongly interacting matter at extreme temperature and density. He was previously awarded the Elizabeth Clay Howald Presidential Fellowship of The Ohio State University (2013), the Chinese National Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Students Abroad (2014), and received an honorable mention from Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 2015 RHIC and AGS Thesis Award competition. His advisor, Prof. Heinz, proudly notes that this is already the second APS DNP Dissertation Award given to one of his protégées, after his student Huichao Song won this award in 2011. Go Bucks!