The CMS Young Researchers Prize dates back to 2012, when seven scientists from the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, as well as from the LHC project, were recognised by the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation for their leadership role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. They awarded a special prize worth $3,000,000 split into three equal parts each for the LHC, ATLAS and CMS experiments (link).

The four CMS recipients of the award felt that some of the money they received should be used to acknowledge the contributions of the younger generation of CMS scientists and engineers.

Every year since then, the CMS Young Researchers Prize has been awarded to at least three persons for their significant and sustained contribution to the CMS experiment over many years. The award aims to identify and recognize young scientists and engineers working in CMS and celebrate their passion, open mindedness, persistence and love for research. The prize comprises a cash sum of CHF 2500 and a medal. It not only values their contributions, but also seeks to help them in their future career by providing high recognition from their peers.

Meet this year’s awardees who tell us about their achievements in CMS and their life as young researchers.

Lorenzo Bianchini - INFN Pisa: "For his crucial and sustained contributions to the commissioning of specific algorithms for the “particle flow” technique, the measurement of H-> ττ and the observation of the ttH channel"

Maria Cepeda - CIEMAT Madrid: "For her crucial and sustained contributions to the operation of the Level-1 and High-Level triggers, to the search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson, and to evaluating the attainable precision for the properties of the Higgs boson from future measurements."

Luokas Gouskos - CERN: "For his crucial and sustained contributions to MET studies in the initial phase of the experiment with ever increasing integrated luminosity, to the search for 3rd generation Supersymmetric particles and in machine learning based algorithms for b-tagging and classification of jet types."