Dan Kasen Honored with E.O. Lawrence Award

Dan Kasen Honored with E.O. Lawrence Award
March 23, 2021
Tuesday, January 12, 2021 to Wednesday, January 13, 2021

The Department of Energy has announced that Susannah Tringe and Dan Kasen, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will receive the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of DOE’s highest honors. Additionally, former Berkeley Lab scientist M. Zahid Hasan, was also named as one of the eight recipients.

The Lawrence Award, named after Berkeley Lab’s founder, was established in 1959. It honors U.S. scientists and engineers, at mid-career, for exceptional contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States.

“Dan Kasen’s and Susannah Tringe’s exceptional research contributions are a tribute to Lawrence’s legacy of team science in service to the nation and world,” said Berkeley Lab Director Mike Witherell. “We’re proud that DOE has recognized the importance of their work and their accomplishments through the Lawrence Award.”

Susannah Tringe is a microbiologist and interim director of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, as well as deputy for user programs at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI). She was recognized for “advances in sequence-based studies of microbial assemblies, revealing the roles of microbial communities in carbon cycling, in interactions with plants, and as drivers of methane production, nutrient cycling, greenhouse gas emissions, and water recycling.”

Dan Kasen is a physicist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division focusing on theoretical and computational astrophysics, with an emphasis on supernovae, neutron star mergers, and other energetic transients. He was recognized for “pioneering contributions in multi-messenger astrophysics, including seminal work on kilonovae, r-process nucleosynthesis, white dwarfs, and Type I and II supernovae; and for leadership in the application of high-performance computing in astrophysics.”

Kasen is the lead scientist for a program called Exastar, which seeks to model astrophysical explosions and is part of DOE’s Exascale Computing Project. He also has appointments as an associate professor in the astronomy and physics departments at UC Berkeley.

Source: Berkeley Lab News Center

Source: Department of Energy  

Research Area: Nuclear Physics