2011 Apker Award Recipients

APS annually chooses two undergraduates as recipients of the LeRoy Apker Award for outstanding achievement in physics research. Typically, one of the recipients comes from a research university, and the other from a four-year college. This year, the selection committee, which was chaired by former APS President Cherry Murray of Harvard, recommended Bethany Jochim of Augustana College and Djordje Radicevic of Princeton for the Award, and these choices were approved by the APS Executive Board in late September. Jochim will be presented with her award at next spring's DAMOP meeting in Anaheim; Radicevic will receive his award at the APS April meeting in Atlanta. They each will receive an award stipend of $5000, and their departments will receive an additional $5000 each to support undergraduate research.

Jochim did her research under the supervision of Eric Wells at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She performed experimental work at Kansas State University, using ultra-fast laser pulses to study the dissociation dynamics of the molecule NO2+. She is a co-author on five peer-reviewed papers, and is currently pursuing graduate work at Kansas State.

Working under the supervision of Herman Verlinde at Princeton, Radicevic did his senior thesis on "Holography from Renormalization Group Flows", an important step in deriving aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence without making use of string theory. He is now doing graduate work at Stanford University.