Prize Recipient

Matthew Ramin Hamedani Heffernan
McGill University

"For the application of state-of-the-art Bayesian analysis techniques in the determination of transport coefficients of strongly interacting matter, and for first-time investigations of multistage simulation approaches in heavy-ion collisions with statistical learning methods."

Matthew Heffernan received his Ph.D. in October 2022 from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His dissertation work, supervised by Dr. Charles Gale, focused on combining large-scale cutting-edge physical simulations and statistical methods to quantify the properties of hot and dense nuclear matter created in heavy-ion collisions. Matthew received his B.Sc. in 2016 from the College of William & Mary in Virginia and his M.Sc. from McGill University in 2018. During his doctoral studies, he was the recipient of Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral and Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral awards. Matthew’s research interests include Bayesian methods for expensive computational models and exploiting the information gained in model-to-data comparison to understand which observables in heavy ion collisions reveal the most about the properties of quark-gluon plasma. Currently, Matthew is working on novel methods for efficient quantification of autonomous vehicle safety for Zoox.