Evelyn Thomson Named American Physical Society Fellow

Evelyn Thomson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been named an American Physical Society (APS) Fellow. APS fellows are selected by their peers for outstanding advances in physics through original research and publication or significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. Thomson’s fellowship citation reads, “For initiating and leading original searches at the Large Hadron Collider for the simplest extension of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model that has spontaneous violation of the R-parity symmetry.”

Thomson has performed experiments at e+e− and hadron colliders at the leading particle physics laboratories around the world. Her research interests include precision measurements of the W boson mass at ALEPH, a particle detector on the Large Electron-Positron collider at CERN; precision measurements of top quark properties and searches for the Higgs boson at the Collider Detector at Fermilab; and searches for physics beyond the standard model at ATLAS, also at CERN. She earned an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2005 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship in 2006. Thomson has also received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest honor for teaching from Penn Arts & Sciences.

The APS is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy, and international activities. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and throughout the world.