Professor Chun Shen, an Assistant Professor of Physics at Wayne State University who holds an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in our Department and is also a RIKEN fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has won the 2019 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Nuclear Physics (for additional details please see http://iupap.org/commissions/c12-nuclear-physics/news/). This Prize is awarded every three years “to recognize and encourage very promising experimental or theoretical research in nuclear physics, including the advancement of methods, procedures, techniques, or devices that contribute in a significant way to nuclear physics research. Candidates for the prize must have a maximum of eight years of research experience (excluding career interruptions) following the Ph.D. (or equivalent) degree.” Dr. Shen received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from The Ohio State University in 2014. In 2015, he won the APS Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics. After two postdoctoral years at McGill University he was awarded the distinguished Goldhaber Fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory which he held from 2016 to 2018.

Dr. Chun Shen's research is central in understanding strongly interacting many-body systems under extreme conditions. He developed a comprehensive theoretical framework which enables precision studies of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) created in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) in the US and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. He used this framework to extract the transport property of the QGP, namely shear, bulk viscosities, and charge diffusion constants. These transport coefficients elucidate the nature of the QGP at extremely high temperature and density.

Congratulations to Dr. Shen!