CMS physicist Dr Jennifer Ngadiuba wins the IUPAP C11 Early Career Award 2024. This prestigious award honours two early career scientists for their excellence in the field of Particles and Fields during the biannual ICHEP conference. Congratulations also to Ian Moult who won alongside Dr Ngadiuba.

The award recognises Dr Ngadiuba’s achievements in "co-design, development and deployment of novel machine learning techniques to address complex elementary particle physics challenges with a focus on ultra-fast real-time data analysis on hardware triggers and for model agnostic searches for beyond the Standard Model physics signals at the Large Hadron Collider". 

Jennifer Ngadiuba has been a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab since 2021, focusing on the search for new physics in collider data and enhancing the capabilities of collider experiments for such searches. She graduated from the University of Zurich, where she conducted research at new center-of-mass energies, searching for new heavy resonances decaying to dibosons at the CMS experiment, and validating and utilizing new jet substructure techniques.

Ngadiuba was a research fellow at CERN and later at Caltech, where she continued to develop experimental techniques for diboson resonances and began exploring the potential of Deep Learning, focusing on anomaly detection and fast inference on FPGAs for the CMS trigger system. Since joining Fermilab, she has integrated her work on anomaly detection and AI in trigger systems to identify potential new physics collisions in real-time with the CMS detector.

Ngadiuba's innovative work in AI applications to CMS physics earned her the U.S. Department of Energy’s AI4HEP award in 2023. In the same year, she was also named a fellow of the AI2050 initiative by Schmidt Sciences, recognizing her significant contributions to the field.

She gave a plenary presentation on her research activities on 24 July at the 2024 ICHEP conference in Prague, in Czechia. Each winner will also receive a medal, a certificate citing their scientific achievement, and a cash award.

Above: Dr Jennifer Ngadiuba gives a plenary talk at ICHEP 2024 in Prague. Photograph by Rene Volfik.

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The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) was established in 1922 to stimulate and facilitate international cooperation in physics and the worldwide development of science. Its 60 members are bodies and societies representing recognised physics communities around the world.

IUPAP Web site: http://www.iupap.org 
Commission on Particles and Fields (C11) of IUPAP:  https://iupap.org/who-we-are/internal-organization/commissions/c11-particles-and-fields/

Past winners:
https://iupap.org/who-we-are/internal-organization/commissions/c11-particles-and-fields/c11-awards/