FSU physicist earns prestigious American Physical Society award

A renowned Florida State University particle physicist has earned a major award from one of the country’s preeminent physics organizations, recognizing her career achievements that have helped drive the field of physics forward for decades.

Laura Reina, FSU Distinguished Research Professor and Joseph F. Owens Endowed Professor in the Department of Physics, is the recipient of the 2024 Jesse W. Beams Award from the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society (SESAPS), a scientific organization committed to advancing physics and creating a professional community for physicists.

“Earning this award is a wonderful surprise, and I am so honored to receive it,” Reina said. “I work with so many colleagues who are deserving of this, and it means so much that they chose to nominate me.”

The Jesse W. Beams Research Award, first presented in 1973 to former FSU professor Earle Plyler, was established by SESAPS to recognize especially significant or meritorious research in physics carried out in the southeastern U.S. The award honors physicists for innovations that yielded precise theoretical predictions used in tests of the Standard Model at hadron colliders. Reina was honored during an awards banquet, part of the SESAPS annual meeting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, on Oct. 25.

“I would like to congratulate Professor Reina for this well-deserved recognition,” said Vice President for Research Stacey S. Patterson. “This award is named for an outstanding physicist who helped developed the first electron linear accelerator, which paved the way for new discoveries. Through her work at FSU and with colleagues around the world, Professor Reina is continuing physicists’ long endeavor to better understand our universe.”

Reina is a member of the FSU High Energy Physics group, which uses both theoretical and experimental methods to investigate elementary particles and their interactions. She is also a member of the Large Hadron Collider Higgs Working Group (LHCHWG) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and the host of the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHCHWG guides CERN’s research of the Higgs boson, which is a key element of the Standard Model of physics and plays a key role in the interplay of theorists and experimentalists. The Higgs discovery in 2012 filled in a missing keystone of the Standard Model and opened new directions for investigating fundamental physics questions.

“Professor Reina’s contributions at CERN are a testament to her hard work and abilities as a scientist and to the quality of the FSU Department of Physics,” Patterson said. “In Tallahassee and at CERN, she is part of cutting-edge research that is helping to answer big open questions in particle physics.”

Reina is the fourth FSU physicist to receive this award, following Plyler in 1973, Professor Emeritus of physics Kirby Kemper in 2000 and Professor of physics Jorge Piekarewicz in 2018.

Among Reina’s recent work is involvement in the American Physical Society (APS) Snowmass 2021 workshop, which assessed the status of the field, identified the most pressing questions to address in the future and noted which areas would motivate future recommendations and decisions. This workshop resulted in a report that served as the basis for the work of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.

“As a theoretical physicist, I help interpret complex data obtained from experiments,” Reina said. “I am really excited about many proposed projects because there are a lot of converging fields in physics right now, and it is an exciting time in physics research.”

Reina, who earned her doctoral degree in elementary particle physics from the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, in 1992, joined FSU’s faculty in 1998.

“I have so much gratitude for FSU, my department, my colleagues and my students for supporting the success of my research program,” Reina said. “It is very rewarding to contribute to making FSU an even more vibrant academic home and see our students moving on to so many exciting careers.”

Since coming to FSU, Reina has earned awards including the FSU First Year Assistant Professor Award, the FSU Dirac-Hellmann Award, the FSU Developing Scholar Award, a Graduate Teaching Award, and the FSU PAI Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research. She was elected as an APS fellow in 2005, and in 2013, she earned the Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Earlier this year, Reina was elected to the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida.

“What a pleasure it is to congratulate Laura on winning the prestigious Jesse W. Beams Award,” said Sam Huckaba, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “She is a leading theoretical high-energy physicist whose outstanding career accomplishments speak for themselves. The arrival of this latest recognition adds a spectacular and well-deserved bonus.”

To learn more about Reina’s work and FSU’s High Energy Physics group, visit hep.fsu.edu. For more information about research conducted in the Department of Physics, visit physics.fsu.edu.