Two members of the FRIB Theory Alliance (FRIB-TA) have earned prizes from the American Physical Society (APS): Baha Balantekin. Eugene P. Wigner Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and Richard Furnstahl, professor of physics at The Ohio State University (OSU). Balantekin won the 2025 APS Hans A. Bethe Prize, and Furnstahl won the 2025 APS Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics. Both are former members of the FRIB-TA executive board.
APS is the major professional organization for physicists in the United States. It has over 50,000 members from academia, national laboratories, and industry. The mission of the APS is to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity, promote physics, and serve the broader physics community.
Baha Balantekin
The Bethe Prize is given "to recognize outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields.” Balantekin was selected for “seminal contributions to neutrino physics and astrophysics—especially the neutrino flavor transformation problem—both for solar neutrinos and the nonlinear supernova environment."
Read the full UW-Madison release.
Richard Furnstahl
The Feshbach Prize is given "to recognize and encourage outstanding research in theoretical nuclear physics.” Furnstahl was selected for "foundational contributions to calculations of nuclei, including applying the Similarity Renormalization Group to the nuclear force, grounding nuclear density functional theory in those forces, and using Bayesian methods to quantify the uncertainties in effective field theory predictions of nuclear observables."
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.