Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been awarded the 2022 Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics by the American Physical Society. The award recognizes outstanding early career experimentalists in nuclear physics. Garcia Ruiz received this award for “novel studies of exotic nuclei using precision laser spectroscopy measurements, including the first spectroscopy of short-lived radioactive molecules.”

Garcia Ruiz was one of the award recipients for the 2020 FRIB Visiting Scholar Program for Experimental Science. He and his team at MIT designed and fabricated a new laser spectroscopy system, the Resonant ionization Spectroscopy Experiments (RiSE), located at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB).

Garcia Ruiz earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, a master’s degree in physics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a PhD in nuclear physics at KU Leuven. He was a research associate at the University of Manchester from 2016-2017 and a research fellow at CERN from 2018-2019. He is currently an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Garcia Ruiz’s research focuses on precision laser spectroscopy experiments of exotic atoms and molecules for nuclear structure and physics beyond the Standard Model.

Read the APS article about Garcia Ruiz’s 2022 Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics award here.