This year's winners of the Pegram, Slack and Beams Awards were announced at the SESAPS Annual Meeting this past weekend at Eastern Kentucky University. The awardees and their citations are below. Congratulations to all the awardees!!!
George B. Pegram Award (for excellence in physics education in the southeast; more info on the Pegram Award)
Erin Bonning, Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Emory Planetarium, Emory University
For developing a program of undergraduate education and public engagement of extraordinary breadth that reaches a diverse population and touches on an incredibly varied set of human endeavors; for her exceptional record of including undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds in her astrophysics research and mentoring them for careers in the sciences; and for establishing wide-ranging cultural programs associated with Emory’s planetarium, the Michael C. Carlos Museum on campus, and with local, national, and international artists that focus on a common and inspiring thread: namely, that science can be perceived through the lens of music, art, or religion, and that works in those fields can provoke thoughts about science in ways that enhance them both.
Francis G. Slack Award (to honor excellence in service to physics in the southeast; more info on the Slack Award)
Roxanne Springer, Professor of Physics, Duke University
For long-term, extensive, and effective service to the physics community; for her relentless and very successful efforts to improve the climate for physicists of all backgrounds at multiple scales – locally at Duke, throughout the Southeast region, nationally and beyond; and for her leadership of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that have deeply benefited the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society and Division of Nuclear Physics.
Jesse W. Beams Award (to recognize especially significant or meritorious research in physics conducted in the southeast; more info on the Beams Award)
Peter Hirschfeld, Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Florida
For his seminal contributions to condensed matter physics and unconventional superconductivity in cuprate and iron-based superconductors; for furthering our understanding of how repulsive Coulomb interactions and multi-orbital bands can mediate unconventional superconductivity; and for advancing new theoretical models and frameworks that have enabled experimental studies of these materials, for example, by devising methods to leverage disorder as a spectroscopic tool via the theory of quasi-particle interference.