PHAS Faculty Mark Halpern and Scott Oser Winners of 2022 Faculty Research Awards
The Physics & Astronomy Department heartily congratulates PHAS faculty members Mark Halpern and Scott Oser as recipients of the 2022 UBC Faculty Research Awards celebrating research excellence. Mark Halpern was awarded the Jacob Biely research Prize, UBC’s premier research award, for his distinguished record of research in experimental cosmology in the areas of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and history of the galaxy and star formation in the early Universe. Scot Oser received a Killam Research prize for his outstanding research contributions in the areas of neutrinos, particle astrophysics, dark matter, and gravitational waves.
The Faculty Research Awards showcase research excellence and scholarly accomplishments of UBC faculty across multiple disciplines, allowing early career researchers and senior faculty across the sciences and humanities to receive public recognition for outstanding work. This year’s award winners strongly represented Science including nine awardees and two top prizes (The Jacob Biely and Charles A. McDowell Awards in Physics & Chemistry).
Both Mark Halpern and Scott Oser are accomplished researchers and educators with rich and varied academic interests.
Mark Halpern received his doctoral degree from M.I.T in 1983, started at UBC as a Postdoctoral Fellow and became a full professor with the PHAS department at UBC in 2003. Currently heading the UBC Experimental Cosmology Lab, Mark’s career has spanned multiple experiments (COBRA, WMAP, BLAST, Herschel/SPRE, ACT, BICEP2, CHIME and CGEM), and he has mentored many graduate and post-graduate students and collaborators. His research has resulted in the building of multiple types of telescopes all over the world with some located in extremely cold, high-altitude, or sub-orbital locations (satellites, or stratospheric balloons) in order to gather measurements unobscured by the atmosphere.
He has received numerous awards and distinctions for his research, including the Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering (2022), the Carlyle S. Beals Award for Career Achievement (2018), and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2017).
Scott Oser completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Chicago in 2000 and joined PHAS in 2003, becoming a full professor in 2013. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the Canadian Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment at Canada’s SNOLAB to detect dark matter particles, and participates in the LISA Consortium, which will be the first space observatory to study gravitational waves and the dark universe.
He has received several awards and recognition for his research, including the CAP-TRIUMF Vogt Medal (2019), the American Physical Society Fellow (2016), and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016). He has also been an active member of various committees and organizations, including the TRIUMF Science Council and the Fermilab Long Baseline Neutrino Committee.
Once again, congratulations to Mark Halpern and Scott Oser for their well-deserved recognition and contributions to the field of physics and astronomy!
Faculty Research Awards
UBC Faculty Research Awards are granted to investigators who display research excellence, in all disciplines across medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, and the applied sciences. These seven annual awards include the Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships, the Killam Faculty Research Fellowships, the President’s Award for Public Education through Media, Killam Faculty Research Prizes, the Jacob Biely Faculty Research Prize, the Charles A. McDowell Award, the Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts and the Sam Black Award for Education and Development in the Visual and Performing Arts. For more information about the UBC Faculty Research Awards, please see here.
Learn More
• Read about the 2022 Killam Research Award winners from the UBC announcement
• Find out more about the Jacob Biely Faculty Resaerch Prize
• Find out more about Killam Research Awards and Fellowships at UBC
• Find out more about Dr. Mark Halpern’s Cosmology research from UBC Media Experts and from his personal research website here
• Learn about Dr. Mark Oser’s research interests in physics from his personal website here