Drs Hallas and Lister Honoured With 2024 Faculty Research Awards

March 17, 2025
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Drs Alannah Hallas and Alison Lister

The Department of Physics & Astronomy is thrilled to announce that two of our esteemed faculty members have been honored with the 2024 UBC Faculty Research Awards: Drs Alannah Hallas and Alison Lister.

These distinguished Killam Awards recognize outstanding research and scholarly contributions, with the UBC Killam Research Prizes being among the highest honors for academic excellence. 

Dr. Hallas has been awarded the UBC Killam Accelerator Research Fellowship, an honor bestowed on early-career researchers who are making significant strides in their fields. Alannah’s interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of Physics and Chemistry. Alannah leads the Quantum Materials Design Lab at the Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (QMI), where her team design and synthesize new quantum materials and then study their properties using neutrons, muons, and x-rays.  Alannah’s research particularly addresses the role of disorder in quantum materials, which her team attempt to control and harness through novel crystal growth approaches.

Alannah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Her exceptional contributions to research and teaching have earned her numerous accolades, including the 2023 Killam Teaching Prize, the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship (2023-2025), and the 2023 IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in Magnetism. She is the Co-Director of CIFAR’s Quantum Materials Program.

Dr. Lister has been honored with the prestigious Killam Research Prize in the sciences, recognizing her distinguished career in particle physics. Alison’s research focuses on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, where protons are collided at high energies to explore the universe’s fundamental building blocks: leptons, gluons, and quarks and their interactions. Her pioneering work centers on the top quark, the heaviest known fundamental particle, which may hold the key to understanding phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Alison's research has the potential to redefine our understanding of the universe. A graduate of ETH Zurich, where she earned her PhD, Alison joined UBC as an Assistant Professor before being promoted to Full Professor in 2023. She also held the Canada Research Chair in Particle Physics (Tier 2) from 2013 to 2024 and was awarded the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) Herzberg Medal in 2018.

Please join us in congratulating Alannah and Alison on these extraordinary achievements and their invaluable contributions to advancing scientific knowledge!

 

The Office of the VP, Research and Innovation will celebrate the achievements of this 2024 faculty award winners at a reception on June 5, 2025.

 

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