Marianna Safronova

Safronova named Physicist of the Month

Marianna Safronova, associate professor of physics and astronomy, received the American Physical Society’s (APS) Woman Physicist of the Month award in August in recognition of her accomplishments as a researcher and mentor.

The APS website announcing Safronova’s award called her “a dynamic researcher who, since 2010, has been publishing one paper every five weeks.” It noted that, “In addition to her spectacularly productive scientific work, she has been an effective mentor of women students,” with her first four graduate students all earning doctoral degrees and going on to hold research positions.

Last December, Safronova was selected as an APS fellow, an honor awarded to the top one-half of1 percent of its members. The society cited her innovative development of high-accuracy first-principles methods of computational atomic structure and dynamics and their application to optical atomic clocks, quantum computing with neutral atoms and tests of fundamental symmetries.