Prize Recipient

Jonathan Wurtele
University of California, Berkeley

Citation:

"For the introduction and use of innovative plasma techniques which produced the first demonstration of the trapping of antihydrogen."

Background:

Jonathan Wurtele received his B.A. (Physics and Mathematics) in 1979 and his Ph.D. (Physics) in 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley. He spent a decade at MIT as a research scientist at the Plasma Fusion Center and as Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics. In 1995, he returned to UC Berkeley, where he is Professor of Physics and Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Wurtele is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Foreign Research Fellow at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan. He has served on the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Physics of Beams, and has co-authored numerous National Research Council reports. He currently serves on the Cockroft Institute Scientific Advisory Committee and on the Princeton University Program in Plasma Physics Advisory Council. His theoretical and computational research focuses on beam and plasma physics. Among the topics he has investigated are free-electron lasers, laser-plasma interactions, nonneutral plasmas, and novel accelerator concepts, such as plasma-based accelerators and muon colliders.  Recently he developed an interest in climate change and is a member of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study. He is a member of the ALPHA collaboration, which in 2010 reported the first trapping of antihydrogen.

Selection Committee:

Michael Mauel, Chair; Richard Berger; Wim Leemans; Troy Carter; Carl Sovinec