The year 2013 was a special year for the CMS PhD Thesis Award programme as Awards were presented to the authors of three outstanding PhD theses. In the wrap-up session of the CMS week on June 27, Awards were presented to Drs. Lorenzo Bianchini, Joern Lange, and Giovanni Petrucciani.

Lorenzo’s PhD was from the Ecole Polytechnique-Palaiseau and the thesis was titled “Search for the Standard Model Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons with the CMS experiment at LHC.”

Joern earned his PhD from the University of Hamburg and his thesis title was “Differential top-quark-pair cross sections in pp collisions at center-of-mass energy 7 TeV with CMS and charge multiplication in highly irradiated silicon sensors.”

Giovanni’s thesis title was “Observation of a new state in the search for the Higgs boson at CMS”, awarded by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Lorenzo and Giovanni continue their postdoctoral research with CMS, while Joern now works for the ATLAS experiment. The CMS collaboration extends its congratulations to these outstanding young scientists.

by Greg Snow