Nepalese president Bidhya Devi Bhandari awards Dr. Rabin Paudel the Nepal Bidhya Bhusan on 8 September 2018.
Recent JILA graduate Dr. Rabin Paudel was awarded the Nepal Bidhya Bhusan this September.
The Nepal Bidhya Bhusan is the highest academic award given by the Nepalese government.
This year, Nepalese president Bidhya Devi Bhandari gave 233 Bidhya Bhusan Padak to Nepalese nationals who have demonstrated outstanding performance in PhD, Masters, of Bachelor’s level academics, at local and foreign universities. The highest level of this award is reserved for those holding PhD degrees.
Paudel earned his PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017. His thesis work, which detailed the probing of strongly interacting Fermi gases, was advised by late JILA Fellow Deborah Jin. Paudel is now a senior optical engineer at Cymer in San Diego, CA.
The Nepal Bidhya Bhushan ceremony took place in Kathmandu at Sital Niwas, the official presidential palace of Nepal, on International Literacy Day and Nepal’s 39th National Education Day, the 8th of September 2018.
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.