Prize Recipient

Shahram Rahatlou
University of California, San Diego

"For his role in the development of the tools needed for the analysis of B factory data, including the tFIT program, a unique and comprehensive fitting framework for time-dependent analyses. The tools he developed played a key role in the observation of CP violation in the B system by the BaBar collaboration. These tools will be essential to the ongoing program of work as the B factories continue to probe the origins of CP violation."

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, Rahatlou obtained his "Laurea in fisica" (the Italian undergraduate degree) from Universita` degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in February 1998, with a thesis on the design and implementation of the simulation software for the central drift chamber of the BaBar experiment, which was under construction at SLAC. He joined UCSD in September 1998 as a graduate student to start his study of CP violation with the BaBar experiment under the supervision of Professor Vivek A. Sharma, and received his PhD in October 2002, with a dissertation on the "Observation of matter--anti-matter asymmetry in the B0 meson system". This is the first observation of CP violation since its discovery, in 1964, in the kaon system. He is currently working at UCSD as a post-doc on BaBar. His main research interest is the measurement of the CKM angle gamma of the Unitarity Triangle, which is an important and promising measurement within the next two years at the PEP-II B-factory. He is also in charge of the Reconstruction program of the BaBar experiment.

Patricia Rankin (Chair), Arie Bodek, Ken Heller, Richard Partridge (Vice-Chair), Heidi Schellman