Graduate Student Awards

Physics & Astronomy

Awards

Theodore Wolf Prize

The Office of Graduate and Professional Education awards the annual Theodore Wolf Prize to a graduate student in the Physical and Life Sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biological Sciences, Geology, Marine Studies, Climatology and Agricultural Sciences) for the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation. The award carries a check for $1,500 and a certificate of recognition.

Winners of the Theodore Wolf Prize from the Department of Physics and Astronomy

2025 — Sohom Roy, Energy transfer dissipation in space plasmas: Studies in the solar wind and earth’s magnetosheath. Adviser: William Matthaeus
2022 — Utkarsh Bajpai, Quantum-classical approach to nonequilibrium system of conduction electronics interacting with localized spins in spintronics. Adviser: Branislav Nikolic
2012 — Mansoor Ur Rehman, Realistic Inflation Models and Primordial Gravity Waves; Adviser: Qaisar Shafi.
2007 — V. Nefer Senoguz, Aspects of Inflationary Models and Unification; Adviser: Qaisar Shafi.
2004 — Alston Jude Misquitta, A Symmetry-Adapted Perturbation Theory Based on Density Functional Description of Monomers; Adviser: Krzysztof Szalewicz.

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award

The University of Delaware's Department of Physics and Astronomy Outstanding Graduate TA Award recognizes a graduate student that has demonstrated excellence in the role of a teaching assistant. The award recipient will receive a $1,000 prize and a certificate of recognition.

2024 — Chung Hei Leung
2023 — Andrew Crossman
2022 — Amit Tiwari
2021 — Amit Tiwari

Daicar-Bata Fund

The Daicar-Bata Fund was established in 1992 in honor of Mr. Otto Daicar and to commemorate his lifetime contributions throughout the world to the Bata Corporation. Mr. Daicar, as an individual and senior executive, exemplified a devotion to performance excellence, unconditional integrity, and kindness, which guided and inspired people of diverse cultures. The initial donation for the fund came from the Bata Corporation and the Daicar family, and the remainder was raised from the alumni of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and matching funds from the University of Delaware.

Every year the Department recognizes exceptional Ph.D. student accomplishments by awarding two Daicar-Bata Prizes. Each recipient receives monetary award and a certificate of recognition:

Daicar-Bata Prize for the best research paper in a Physics or Astronomy peer-reviewed journal published during the current academic year,
Daicar-Bata Prize for the highest grade point average in Physics and Astronomy courses at the end of the student's 6th semester in the program.

Rules of the Competition

Nominations for this award may be made by the advisor, a colleague or a fellow student and must include:

A letter of nomination which:
- includes a short statement of why the paper is significant and merits the Daicar-Bata prize, and
- clearly identifies the contributions of the nominee to the paper.
A reprint of the scientific paper that is the basis for the prize.
A one-page resume of the nominee.
The nominated student should supply a one-page explanation in the simplest terms of the content and main results of the nominated paper.

The three top candidates for this prize will present their work during a colloquium of the fall semester, and the winner will be decided by a panel of DPA faculty.

Recipients of the Daicar-Bata Prize for best Ph.D. student research paper

2025 — Federico Garcia-Gaitan for Terahertz and High-Harmonic Radiation from Ultrafast Light Subgap or Above-Gap Driving of Spin-Orbit Proximitized Antiferromagnetic Mott Insulator, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 086704 (2025).
2024 — Sasiri Juliana Vargas Urbano for Homeocurvature adaptation of phospholipids to pressure in deep-sea invertebrates, Winnikoff et al., Science 384, 1482–1488 (2024).
2023 — Mojtaba Taghipour Kaffash for Direct probing of strong magnon-photon coupling in a planar geometry, Quantum Science and Technology 8, 01LT02 (2023).
2022 — Weipeng Wu for Modification of terahertz emission spectrum using microfabricated spintronic emitters, J. Appl. Phys. 128, 103902 (2020).
2021 — Christiana Erba for Ultraviolet line profiles of slowly rotating massive star winds using the ‘analytic dynamical magnetosphere’ formalism, MNRAS 506, 5373–5388 (2021).
2020 — Utkarsh Bajpai for Robustness of quantized transport through edge states of finite length: Imaging current density in Floquet topological versus quantum spin and anomalous Hall insulators, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 033438 (2020)
2019 — Tyler Williamson for Periastron observations of TeV gamma-ray emissions from a binary system with a 50-year period, The American Astronomical Society, 867 (2018).
2018 — Muhammad Shahbaz for Do semilocal density-functional approximations recover dispersion energies at small intermonomer separations? Physical Review Letters 121, 113402 (2018).
2017 — Michael Metz for Automatic generation of intermolecular potential energy surfaces, The Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 12, 5895 (2016).
2016 — Jesus Nieto-Pescador for Heterogeneous electron-transfer dynamics through dipole-bridge groups, The Journal of Physical Chemistry C 120, 48 (2016).
2015 — Yunpeng Chen for Designing and tuning magnetic resonance with exchange interaction, Advanced Materials 27, 1351 (2015).
2014 — Halise Celik for Quantifying interface and bulk contributions to spin-orbit torque In magnetic bilayers Nature Communications 5,3042 (2014).
2013 — Bin Fang for State engineering of photon pairs produced through duel-pump spontaneous four-wave mixing, Optics Express 21, 2707 (2013).
2012 — Ryan Stearrett for Influence of exchange bias on magnetic losses in CoFeB/MgO/CoFeB tunnel junctions, Physical Review Letters B 86, 014415 (2012).
2011 — Q. Lu for Supercapacitor electrodes with high-energy and power densities prepared from monolithic NiO/Ni nanocomposites, Angewandte Chemie International Edition; 50, 6847 (2011).
2010 — Rizwan Khalid for Constrained minimal supersymmetric standard model spectroscopy in light of PAMELA and ATIC observations, Physical Review Letters D 79, 055019 (2009).
2009 — Xiaoming Kou for Tunable ferromagnetic resonance in NiFe nanowires with strong magnetostatic interaction, Applied Physics Letters 94, 112509 (2009).
2008 —‚ Ralitsa L. Dragomirova for Spin and charge shot noise in mesoscopic spin Hall systems, Europhysics Letters 84, 37004 (2008).
2007 — Thomas Madura forA nozzle analysis of slow-acceleration solutions in one-dimensional models of rotating hot-star winds, Astrophysics Journal 660, 687 (2007).
2006 — Sasikumar Palaniyappan for Ultrastrong field ionization of Nen+ (n <= 8): Rescattering and the role of the magnetic field, Physical Review Letters 94, 243003 (2005).

Recipients of the Daicar-Bata Prize for the highest Ph.D. student GPA

2025 — Federico Garcia-Gaitan, Luis Herrera-Rodriguez, Conor Larsen
2024 — Muhammad Bilal Khan
2023 — Benjamin Flaggs, Connor Mooney
2022 — Joseph Betz, Muhammad Hani Zaheer
2021 — James "Shea" Fitzgerald
2019 — Riddhi Bandyopadhyay
2018 — Hassan Shahfar
2017 — Yue Pan
2016 — Alexander Wise
2015 — Yunjiao Cao
2014 — Colby Haggerty
2013 — Bin Fang
2012 — Farzad Mahfouzi
2011 — Adeel Ajaib and Bin He
2010 — Hassnain Jaffari
2009 — Rizwan Khalid
2008 — Mansoor Rehman
2007 — Rupsi Pal
2006 — Meijun Lu

Monika & Qaisar Shafi Physics Outstanding Dissertation Award

The annual award recognizes the top dissertation by a physics doctoral student (theoretical, computational, experimental) in order to encourage the highest levels of scholarship, research and writing. Each spring, we invite nominations for doctoral students who complete their dissertation in the previous four academic terms from spring to winter. Dissertations are evaluated on the importance/impact of the scholarship; originality/creativity; citations of thesis related publications (journal articles, book chapter, etc.); organization of the dissertation; quality of the writing; and other appropriate factors that denote excellence. The winner of the award will receive a $2,500 monetary prize for their achievement.

Rules of the Competition

A letter from the dissertation advisor that evaluates both the quality of the research and the dissertation’s contribution to knowledge in the nominee’s field.
A copy of the dissertation.
Support letter(s) from at least one dissertation committee member who is NOT the advisor to provide informed views of the dissertation’s quality and significance.
A short summary (1–2 pages) from the degree recipient to describe the work to non-experts.
Provide a separate list of thesis related publications with indication of how many of each publication has been cited thus far.
A copy of the student’s CV or resume. Please note: students must include their GPA and expected graduation date on their CV or resume.