Date:
Monday, February 14, 2022
Professor J. Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux was awarded the 2021 International Partnership Prize for Young Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This award is bestowed annually to a scientist under 45 years of age outside of China who, in collaboration with a partner in China, has made substantial contributions to research and innovation in any scientific field.
Prof. Ochoa-Ricoux’s co-recipient of this award is Dr. Miao He of the Institute of High-Energy Physics in Beijing. The two scientists made key contributions to the installation, commissioning, and data analysis of the Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment, which studies the neutrinos emitted by six nuclear reactors in China. Their contributions helped pave the way for Daya Bay's discovery of a third type of neutrino oscillation, which was rewarded with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2016, among other recognitions.
In addition to their ongoing leadership in the Daya Bay experiment, which continues to produce some of the world’s leading results in reactor neutrino physics, the two scientists are playing a very prominent role in the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory. This is a multi-purpose observatory under construction in China involving over 650 collaborators from all around the world that will study neutrinos from nuclear reactors, the Sun, the Earth, Supernovae, and the atmosphere, among others. Both scientists co-lead one of the major subsystems of this project, consisting of 25,600 photomultiplier tubes as well as all the associated electronics, and co-convene a group tasked with assessing the experiment’s sensitivity to one of its most important measurements. Moreover, Prof. Ochoa-Ricoux currently serves in the experiment’s executive board, to which he has been elected three times, and is the co-chair of the speakers committee.
Visit the URL below for the Chinese version of the announcement: