Muhammad Shahbaz and Hassan Shahfar, doctoral students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, have been awarded prestigious Daicar-Bata Prizes.

Each year, the department recognizes exceptional doctoral student accomplishments by awarding two Daicar-Bata prizes — one for the best research paper in a peer-reviewed journal during the previous academic year and another for the highest grade point average in the department’s courses (totaled after the student’s sixth semester).

This year’s award for best research paper was presented to Shahbaz for “Do Semilocal Density-Functional Approximations Recover Dispersion Energies at Small Intermonomer Separations?” The paper was published in "Physical Review Letters."

Shahfar received the award for highest GPA, acknowledging his success in obtaining a 4.000 cumulative GPA, the highest among his 79 fellow students.
Shahbaz and Shahfar each received a certificate and a $2,500 award.

“The Daicar-Bata Prizes serve to recognize and support achievement excellence and to advance the physics graduate program to a higher level of academic and research performance,” said Edmund Nowak, department chair and professor of physics and astronomy.

The initial donation for the fund came from the Bata Corp. in honor of Otto Daicar and from the Daicar and Glyde families. The rest was raised from alumni of the department and matching funds from UD.

The three finalists in the research paper competition presented their work during a recent departmental colloquium. After Shahbaz was selected for the prize, the others, Alexander Wise and Abhishek Sharan, were presented $250 prizes and certificates of excellence in scholarship. Wise published in "The Astrophysical Journal" and Sharan in "Science Advances."