Kyle Leach, associate professor of physics at the Colorado School of Mines and adjunct associate professor at FRIB, has received the 2025 American Physical Society’s Francis M. Pipkin Award. Leach earned the award for “initiating and establishing new measurement techniques using rare-isotope-doped superconducting sensors as sensitive probes of fundamental physics in the electroweak sector.”

The Francis M. Pipkin Award recognizes research accomplishments by an early-career scientist in the interdisciplinary area of precision measurement and fundamental constants and encourages the wide dissemination of the research results. Award recipients are chosen based on work in the area of precision measurement and fundamental constants.

In 1997, the Topical Group on Precision Measurement and Fundamental Constants established the award in memory of Francis M. Pipkin. Pipkin was a member of the topical group whose wide interests in physics included experiments in condensed matter, nuclear, high energy, and atomic, molecular and optical physics, with a special interest in precision measurements. The award is endowed by contributions from family members, friends, students, and colleagues of Frank Pipkin.

Read the Colorado School of Mines press release here.

Michigan State University (MSU) operates the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) as a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), with financial support from and furthering the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of today’s most pressing challenges. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.