Marit Fiechter was presented with SPIN prize by NNV Chair Diederik Jekel at the FYSICA conference.
One of JILA’s former students was awarded high honors at Netherland’s Physical Society’s annual FYSICA conference this April. Marit Fiechter, an undergraduate student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, won the Students of Physics In the Netherlands (SPIN) prize for her bachelor’s project, which included a 500 Euro cash prize from the Dutch Society of Physics.
Most undergraduate students in the Netherlands complete a three-month project at the end of his or her degree. Fiechter’s prize-winning thesis on narrow-line cooling of yttrium monoxide grew out of her work in Jun Ye’s lab at JILA. She says JILA’s collaborative spirit not only helped her research, it helped her grow as a scientist.
“I'm very grateful Jun gave me the opportunity to join his group; I really enjoyed my time at JILA,” she said in an email. “Not only did I like the project, I also got along with my coworkers (Ian Finneran, Yewei Wu and Shiqian Ding) really well. They are the reason I've learned as much as I have now, by always answering my questions and then enthusiastically explaining even more!”
She added, “I feel like I was surrounded by talented and hard-working people, who are eager to push their experiment forward while at the same time not stressing out about it.”
Fiechter will start her master’s degree in physics at ETH Zürich this September.
The Physics Frontiers Centers (PFC) program supports university-based centers and institutes where the collective efforts of a larger group of individuals can enable transformational advances in the most promising research areas. The program is designed to foster major breakthroughs at the intellectual frontiers of physics by providing needed resources such as combinations of talents, skills, disciplines, and/or specialized infrastructure, not usually available to individual investigators or small groups, in an environment in which the collective efforts of the larger group can be shown to be seminal to promoting significant progress in the science and the education of students. PFCs also include creative, substantive activities aimed at enhancing education, broadening participation of traditionally underrepresented groups, and outreach to the scientific community and general public.