PANDA Website

Every year, PANDA awards a prize for the best PhD thesis in PANDA of the last year and we’d like to ask again for nominations for this year's prize. The rules are simple as usual:

Who is eligible? And how can nominations be made?

Members of PANDA who have had the oral defense of their PhD thesis during the year preceding the selection are eligible. The thesis may contain work related to other topics/experiments, but the majority of the work in the thesis must be directly connected to PANDA. The thesis advisor can nominate someone who successfully passed the oral defense during the period from June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023.

A nomination can be made until August 31, 2023 (almost 2 months from now!!) by submitting the following information to the speaker of the collaboration:

1. A nomination letter in which the content of the thesis and the importance of this work for PANDA is described. This should also motivate why that thesis should be considered as the best one of the selection period from PANDA.

2. The thesis must be made available online on the PANDA webpage, and the URL must be included in the nomination. If it is not allowed to upload the thesis to the PANDA website, then a hard copy of the thesis must be submitted.

3. If the thesis is not written in English, then a (couple page) summary must be provided in English.

4. A copy of a certificate showing the grade achieved by the thesis (and a short description of the grade scale). This certificate should indicate the date of the oral exam. If that is not the case, then some other confirmation of when the oral exam was held must be provided (a letter for the thesis advisor will suffice, if a copy of a formal document is delivered before the September meeting.)

The nomination must be made in writing/email. The PANDA Award Committee will propose a PhD Prize Committee as soon as all nominations are in. 

Please keep in mind that potential awardees for the PhD Prize need to be present at the GSI Meeting in October for their PhD presentation. Please consider registration and (if necessary) visa application in time for them.

Dr. Jenny Regina (Photo: JR/private) has received the PANDA PhD Prize 2022 for her doctoral thesis "Time for Hyperons. Development of Software Tools for Reconstructing Hyperons at PANDA and HADES" at  Uppsala University. Her doctoral advisor was Prof. Dr. Karin Schönning. The award was announced by the spokesman of the PANDA Collaboration, Ulrich Wiedner from the Ruhr-University Bochum, at the most recent PANDA Collaboration meeting at GSI.
The PANDA Collaboration has awarded the PhD Prize once per year since 2013 in order to honor the best dissertation written in connection with the PANDA Experiment. In her dissertation, Physicist Jenny Regina presented a detailed simulation study of hyperons in the PANDA detector, developments of time-based track reconstruction algorithms for PANDA and a library for kinematic fitting in the HADES experiment. A candidate for online track reconstruction algorithms on free streaming data based on a 4D Cellular Automaton has been developed and is benchmarked. It utilizes information from the PANDA straw tube tracker and is agnostic to the point of origin of the particle. The track reconstruction quality assurance procedure and results from the tracking at different event rates have also been presented. Finally, extrapolation algorithms for including hit information from additional detectors in the tracks are outlined. In order to maximize the potential of the predecessor experiment PANDA@HADES, a kinematic fitting procedure has been developed for HADES that combines geometric the decay vertex information of neutral particles and track parameters such as momentum. Journal publications are prepared for each part and Dr. Regina has presented her work at several national and international conferences, as well as in plenary sessions at the PANDA collaboration meeting.
The PANDA Collaboration awards the PhD Prize to specifically honor students’ contributions to the PANDA project. Candidates for the PhD Prize are nominated by their doctoral advisors. In addition to being directly related to the PANDA Experiment, the nominees’ doctoral degrees must have received a rating of “very good” or better. Up to three candidates are shortlisted for the award and can present their dissertations at the PANDA Collaboration meeting. The winner is chosen by a committee that is appointed for this task by the PANDA collaboration.