Every year, the CMS Young Researcher’s Prize is awarded to CMS members who are less than around eight years into their careers after the completion of their PhD or an equivalent qualification. The Prize recognizes their outstanding achievements and is awarded to at least three members who have made a very significant and sustained contribution to CMS over many years in any area of the experiment (hardware, software, technical, analysis, etc.).

Each awardee receives a medal as well as and a cash prize of CHF 2500. The medal itself is made out of a piece of the CMS magnet’s conductor.

The 2014 CMS Young Researcher’s Prize was awarded to:

• Kostas Kousouris: For his sustained and critical contributions to the development of jet energy calibration, tests of QCD and searches for new physics using jets.
• Andrea Rizzi: For his sustained and critical contributions to the silicon microstrip tracker, its exploitation through the development of software for track reconstruction and secondary vertex tagging, and the search for long-lived exotic particles.
• Markus Stoye: For his sustained and critical contributions to the development of the software for the alignment of the Tracker, to the measurement of the polarization of W bosons at high pT, and to the search for supersymmetry in all–hadronic and single lepton channels.
• Jean-Roch Vlimant: For his sustained and critical contributions to the development of software for the calorimeter and tracking triggers at HLT; data quality monitoring, detector simulation and reconstruction software.