Samit and Reshma Sharma Graduate Scholarship in Physics

In 2024 the Samit & Reshma Sharma Foundation established a new graduate student award at UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, to recognize and celebrate achievements at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre. As Canada’s pre-eminent national physics laboratory and one of the world’s leading subatomic physics research centres, TRIUMF reflects the Foundation’s mission to “seek, recognize, promote, and celebrate exceptional scholars and distinguished programs at leading institutions in study, skill development, learning, and research.”

On December 15, 1974, in a quiet corner of The University of British Columbia’s Point Grey campus, scientists at TRIUMF activated the lab’s cyclotron and produced Canada’s first high-energy proton beam. This achievement came to mark the beginning of a broad program in experimental physics that employed the cyclotron’s capacities to explore a wide range of research areas, including nucleon interactions and materials science. By the early 1980’s, TRIUMF’s was the world’s largest cyclotron and a leading particle accelerator laboratory.

Over the course of the next 50 years, TRIUMF has grown, adapted and evolved to stay at the forefront of international physics. The cyclotron firmly established Canada within the realm of international physics collaborations and this role continues with TRIUMF researchers making valuable contributions to such major initiatives as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS Experiment. A more recent focus is on rare isotopes: building on the expertise developed in its accelerator work and its community of experts, TRIUMF is advancing discovery in the exciting new field of isotope science.

Now operating as a consortium of 21 Canadian universities, TRIUMF is a hub of multidisciplinary researchers, engineers, technicians and students conducting innovative research and inspiring entrepreneurial initiatives.

Its unique community of world-leading scientists creates an exceptional research environment in which outstanding graduate students are empowered to become the next generation of STEM leaders.

Since its founding in 1968, TRIUMF has: (click to expand)

Made key contributions to Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the ATLAS detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which led to the discovery of the long-theorized Higgs boson, the particle which gives all other particles their mass;
Led the Canadian contribution to the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) long-baseline neutrino experiment in Japan;
Become a world-leader in the production of rare isotope beams, used to examine the nuclear reactions that take place in stars and star explosions. This impact leverages TRIUMF’s Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory, ARIEL, which is one of the world’s only purpose-built multi-user rare isotope facility and the world’s most powerful Isotope Separation Online (ISOL) complex;
Advanced understanding of brain health, and led to the development of radiopharmaceuticals for imaging and treating disease;
Delivered 2 million patient doses of medical isotopes per year, around the world, through its commercial partnership with global BWXT Medical;
Played a leading role in an international consortium that designed and built a low-cost ventilator for use in hospitals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; the resulting MVM Ventilator received Health Canada approval and was purchased by the Government of Canadian to combat the pandemic;
Spearheaded a team that developed non-reactor based techniques for producing 99mTc, winning a NSERC Brockhouse Prize in 2015 for the project, and ultimately receiving Health Canada approval in November 2020;
Established IAMI, the Institute for Advanced Medical Isotopes, a state-of-the-art facility for research into next-generation, life-saving medical isotopes and radiopharmaceuticals, located on the TRIUMF campus;
Created and supported spin-off companies using TRIUMF-developed technologies for applications in mining, medical imaging, and other industries;
Trained thousands of students from across Canada and around the world in a range of disciplines, including particle and nuclear physics, engineering, materials and life sciences, data science, business, and communications;
With TRIUMF Innovations, supported the development of the Canadian Medical Isotope Ecosystem (CMIE) for Canadian patients;
Established a variety of scholarships and unique researcher opportunities that support the advancement of equity, diversity, and inclusion (in STEM);
Continued to expand its member university base from coast-to-coast to better represent a diversity of Canadian perspectives and participation in its cutting edge science programs.

Award description:

Samit and Reshma Sharma Graduate Scholarship in Physics: A gift of $100,000 from the Samit & Reshma Sharma Foundation has established an endowment fund known as the “Samit and Reshma Sharma Graduate Scholarship in Physics Endowment Fund” (the “Sharma Physics Fund”). The Sharma Physics Fund will support scholarships for outstanding graduate students in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Preference will be given to students who have participated in or will be participating in research projects with TRIUMF physicists and/or students studying particle physics, nuclear physics, materials research or medical physics. The awards are made on the recommendation of the Department of Physics & Astronomy, in consultation with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. (First award available for the 2024/2025 academic year)

2025 Inaugural Recipient

The inaugural recipient of this new award is Riku Mizuta, PHAS PhD student working in Theoretical physics.

PHAS Department Head, Jeremy Heyl and student Riku Mizuta.

I am a PhD candidate in Physics at UBC and TRIUMF. I am focusing on dark matter: various astrophysical phenomena (from stars’ motions in a galaxy to galaxy distributions across the Universe to cosmic microwave background) show that the Universe requires five times more matter than the matter we know, but its microscopic nature is not well understood yet. My research aims to build new dark matter models, narrow down models with existing experimental data, and propose novel searches for dark matter. I am also passionate about reaching out to wider communities—I have taken part in TRIUMF’s public tour program for the general public and school groups, and outreach events such as Dark Matter Day and Saturday Morning Lectures.

As a theorist, I find TRIUMF as the intersection of theory and experiment, and of various sciences. In my training as a tour guide, I had a chance to learn about many experiments on site from nuclear physics experiments to material sciences to medical isotope production. It is remarkable to see how TRIUMF’s cyclotron continues to source experiments from different research areas. Furthermore, theorists and experimentalists have a plenty of opportunities to mingle and collaborate at TRIUMF; my experimentalist friends and their machines that I give tours for have inspired a lot of ideas and brought me far more appreciation of experimental data that we see on academic papers! The interconnectedness of disciplines and modes of research is something unique in national labs like TRIUMF and has nourished my research life on dark matter.

Inaugural recipient, Riku Mizuta, in the Theory Room at TRIUMF, contemplating the Boltzmann Equation which describes the evolution of the abundance of dark matter in the Universe. Photo courtesy: TRIUMF

I am absolutely honoured to be the inaugural recipient of this scholarship. It came as such a pleasant surprise, and I am very grateful to the Samit & Reshma Sharma Foundation for making this scholarship possible. Receiving this scholarship has motivated me to contribute to the mystery of dark matter even further! - Riku Mizuta

List of Recipients

Future recipients will be listed here.

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