Phiala E Shanahan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Recipient of the 2021 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award
For key insights into the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei using numerical and analytical methods and pioneering the use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations in particle and nuclear physics.
About the Recipient
Phiala Shanahan is an assistant professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained her BSc from the University of Adelaide in 2012 and her Ph.D., also from the University of Adelaide, in 2015. Before joining the MIT physics faculty in 2018, Prof. Shanahan was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT and held a joint position as Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary and Senior Staff Scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Prof. Shanahan's research develops understanding of the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei from the fundamental (quark and gluon) degrees of freedom encoded in the Standard Model of particle physics using analytic tools and high performance supercomputing. Her honors and awards include an NSF CAREER award, a DoE Early Career Award, an Emmy Noether fellowship, an APS dissertation award, and the Australian Institute of Physics Bragg Gold Medal.
About the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award
The Mayer Award recognizes and enhances outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career, and provides opportunities for her to present these achievements to others through public lectures in the spirit of Maria Goeppert Mayer.
The award was established in 1985 through sponsorship by the General Electric Foundation (now the GE Fund) and generously endowed by Dr. Virginia Trimble in 2019.