Ana Maria Rey Wins APS' Award For Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics
Congratulations to Dr. Ana Maria Rey, 2005 physics grad and winner of this year's Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics award. In the 13-year history of the award, Dr. Rey is the first female recipient. She is also only the second theoretical physicist to win the award.
This award is distributed by the American Physical Society “to recognize doctoral thesis research of outstanding quality and achievement in atomic, molecular, or optical physics and to encourage effective written and oral presentation of research results.”
Working with Dr. Charles Clark, adjunct professor in the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology and chief of the Electron & Optical Physics Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Dr. Rey developed a thesis on the time evolution of a Bose-Einstein condensate loaded into an optical lattice.
In this work, she presented a formalism capable of dealing with situations where non-equilibrium approaches commonly used by AMO physicists, such as kinetic theories based on an idea called the Markovian approximation fail. This is an extraordinary accomplishment with implications for both the theoretical and experimental physics community.
Dr. Rey is currently finishing up her work at NIST. In August, she will begin a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For more information about the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics, please visit the American Physical Society at http://www.aps.org/praw/dissdamo/index.cfm.
