Annual PhD Thesis Prize: Computational Physics Group

Eligibility

Entry is open to all students who:

• are from an institution in the UK or Ireland
• took a PhD examination between 1 January 2023 and the prize submission deadline of 30 April 2024
• did not apply for the CPG Thesis Prize in the previous year

Submissions

Send us:

• a four-page (A4) abstract
• a one-page (A4) citation from the PhD supervisor, that includes:
• the date of PhD examination
• confirmation that the student passed
• information about whether the thesis has also been submitted to another IOP group for a PhD thesis prize
• a one-page (A4) confidential report from the external thesis examiner
• PDF documents if possible

Deadline

We are no longer accepting submissions for 2024. Please email any queries to group prize contact Dr Tyler Shendruk MInstP: [email protected].

Winners are invited to write an article in the Computational Physics Group newsletter.

If a similar thesis prize is offered by another IOP group (such as the Theory of Condensed Matter Group), the Committee will liaise with the group so that both prizes are not awarded to the same applicant.

Winners

2023

First prize: Michael Davies

University College London and University of Cambridge. For the thesis, Solving Mysteries of Ice Formation with Simulation and Data-driven Methods.

Second prize: Dimitrios Bachtis

Swansea University. For the thesis, Quantum Field-theoretic Machine Learning and the Renormalization Group.

2022

First prize: Zafiirah Hosenie

University of Manchester. For the thesis, Feature Detection and Classification in Streaming and Non-streaming Astronomical Datasets.

Second prize: Mary Coe

University of Bristol. For the thesis, Hydrophobicity Across Length Scales: The Role of Surface Criticality.

2021

Sarah Jenkins

University of York. For the thesis titled Spin Dynamics Simulations of Iridium Manganese Alloys.

2020

Javier Díaz

University of Lincoln. For the thesis titled Computer Simulations of Block Copolymer Nanocomposite Systems.

2019

Aldo Glielmo

King's College London. For Gaussian processes for force fields and wave functions.

2018 

Gabriel Constantinescu

The University of Cambridge. For a thesis on large-scale density functional theory study of van der Waals heterostructures.

2017

First prize: Ioan Magdau

The University of Edinburgh. For the thesis, Theoretical Investigation of Solid Hydrogen and Deuterium.

Joint second prize: Ahmed Al-Refaei

UCL. For the thesis, Efficient Production of Hot Molecular Line Lists.

Joint second prize: Morgane Vacher

Imperial College London. For the thesis, Electron and Nuclear Dynamics Following Molecular Ionization: Computational Methods and Applications.

2016

First prize: Cathal O'Broin

Dublin City University. For the thesis, A New GPU-based Computational Framework for the Ab initio Solution of the TDSE for Atomic and Molecular One-Electron Systems under Intense Ultra-Short Laser Fields.

Joint second prize: Patrick Cannon

Lancaster University. For the thesis, Numerical Simulation of Wave-Plasma Interactions in the Ionosphere.

Joint second prize: Andrew Goldsborough

University of Warwick. For the thesis, Tensor Networks and Geometry for the Modelling of Disordered Quantum Many-Body Systems.