Prize Recipient

Magdalena Djordjevic
Columbia University

Citation:

"For her dissertation presenting a theoretical treatment of heavy quark energy loss in a strongly interacting quark gluon plasma in which the gluon radiative energy loss was solved to all orders in opacity."

Background:

Magdalena Djordjevic was born in 1976 in Nis, Serbia. She graduated from the Mathematical Gymnasium - a special school for students talented in mathematics and physics - as one of the best students in her generation. She got her Diploma in Physics from the University of Belgrade in August 2000, and she won the prestigious Ministry of Science fellowship for five times. Her diploma thesis research, done under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Istok Mendas, was in Quantum Statistical Physics. In September 2000, she enrolled in PhD studies at Columbia University, as a Faculty Fellow. Her thesis work, which addressed theoretical problems in Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, was done under the guidance of Professor Miklos Gyulassy. In joint work with Professor Gyulassy, she developed a formalism that allows to compute the radiative energy loss for heavy quarks in a hot quark-gluon plasma to all orders in opacity. This theory allows to obtain theoretical predictions for heavy-ion collision experiments at RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) and LHC (the Large Hadron Collider). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University under the supervision of Professor Ulrich Heinz. Her current research addresses collisional heavy quark energy loss and generalization of the energy loss formalism to a dynamical medium.