Three members of the FRIB user community were named 2018 American Physical Society (APS) Fellows: Scott Bogner, Gaute Hagen, and Kate Jones.

APS is a nonprofit membership organization that works to advance and spread knowledge of physics via publications, meetings, activities, and more. Fellows are selected for their outstanding contributions to physics. Each year, the number of APS fellows elected is no more than one half of one percent of the membership.

Scott Bogner

ScottScott Bogner is a professor of physics and theoretical nuclear science department head at FRIB.

Bogner was elected by APS for “the development and application of renormalization group methods to low-energy nuclear physics, including the similarity renormalization group and the in-medium similarity renormalization group as a new ab initio method.”

“My research uses quantum mechanics to describe the behavior of nuclei starting from the microscopic forces between the constituent nucleons (i.e., protons and neutrons),” said Bogner.

Bogner earned his PhD from Stony Brook University in New York in 2002. He worked on his post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington from 2002 to 2004 and at Ohio State University from 2004 to 2007. Later in 2007, he became an assistant professor at Michigan State University. In 2012, he was promoted to an associate professor. In 2018, he became a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

“When I look at the list of the APS fellows in nuclear physics, I’m struck by the consistently high caliber of research across the board. I’m flattered that the selection committee deemed my research contributions, which I should stress were collective efforts with many outstanding collaborators, to be worthy of this honor,” said Bogner.

Gaute Hagen 

Gaute Hagen is a Research and Development staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Hagen was elected by APS for “contributions to the development of coupled-cluster methods in nuclear physics and his theoretical predictions for the structure of rare isotopes.”

ORNL describes this research as a “focus on computational and theoretical advances in ab initio approaches for atomic nuclei with the goal of understanding the structure and decays of nuclei and the physics of matter at the extremes of the nuclear landscape.”

Hagen received his candidatus scientiarum (a higher-education degree awarded in Norway for graduate studies) in 2001 at the University of Bergen in Norway. He continued at the University of Bergen to gain his PhD in 2005, and immediately after graduating started as a post-doc at the University of Tennessee/ORNL. Since 2008 he has been a full-time staff member at ORNL.

“It made me happy that the work our group has been doing over the last decade or so in describing the atomic nucleus from ground up has been recognized by such a distinguished honor by our community,” Hagen said. “This tells me that the work that I have been involved in here at ORNL is both recognized and appreciated by our colleagues and peers. This honor is a motivation to keep pushing the work we are doing in describing properties of atomic nuclei even further.”

Kate Jones  

Kate Jones is a professor of experimental nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was elected as a Fellow for her “important contributions to understanding the structure of neutron-rich and weakly bound nuclei, in particular from neutron transfer reactions with radioactive ¹³²Sn beams.”

Jones earned a PhD from the University of Surrey in England in 2000 and held postdoctoral positions in Darmstadt, Germany, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory before joining the Tennessee faculty in 2006. She is currently teaching a course on Physics for Future Presidents as part of the First-Year Studies program. She also serves as an associate head of the UT Physics Department, and is a member of the FRIB Science Advisory Committee.

“I knew I had been nominated, but I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. I was just very happy,” said Jones. “[This] is the culmination of many years of research. To be elected is truly an honor.”