Winners of 2025 Harvard Student Prizes

Physics department celebrated the achievements of our undergraduate and graduate students with awards presentation on April 29, 2025:

Jack T. Sanderson Memorial Prize in Physics
for graduating seniors with the highest GPA among concentration courses

  • Tasuku Ono
     

Carol Davis Prize
Awarded to a Physics concentrator in recognition of their efforts to build a more inclusive and welcoming environment in the Physics Department.

  • Meghan Marangola
  • Elizabeth Kozlov
     

White Prize
Awarded annually to Teaching Fellows who have demonstrated excellence in teaching introductory courses in Physics. 

The winners this year are:

  • Aizhan Akhmetzhanova
  • Aidan Chambers
  • Chandrika Chandrashekar
  • Shu-Fan Chen
  • Louis Colson
  • Kellianne Kornick
  • Caroline Martin
  • Noah McNeal 
  • Filip Niewinski
  • Paige Robichaud
  • Liza Rozenberg
  • Debmalya Sarkar
  • Hiromitsu Sawaoka
  • DaLi Schaefer
  • Pavel Stroganov
  • Adam Tropper
  • Conner Williams
  • Jason Yu
  • Gemma Zhang

 


Merit Fellowship Winners
Each year, the department chooses an outstanding experimentalist and theorist for nomination for a Merit Fellowship. The nominees must have passed their qualifying exams and have an approved dissertation prospectus. The winners of the Merit Fellowship are chosen by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from among all nominations from all departments, and the award allows students to focus their time on research and or writing. 

  • Rahul Sahay, whose research focuses on the entanglement structure of emergent quantum phenomena and their realization in cold-atom and solid-state quantum simulators.
     

Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Prize
Awarded annually to the outstanding theoretical and experimental graduate students who have passed their qualifying oral examinations in the preceding year.

Experimentalist:
Theorist:
  • Andy Jin, whose research focuses on charmed hadron production in neutrino telescopes and its implications to astrophysical tau neutrino search.
  • Liza Rozenberg, whose research focuses on understanding various aspects of quantum gravity using methods from QFT and string theory.

The Cutting Prize 
was established by bequest of W. Bayard Cutting, Jr., 1900, and is awarded to two students "of the very highest intellectual attainments." Winners are chosen by the faculty of the Physics Department and this year they are:

  • Thao Dinh, whose research focuses on the interplay of exotic magnetic order and topology in 2-dimensional van der Waals materials.
  • David Wu, whose research focuses on studying different energy scales in quantum gravity and the relations among them