We are very pleased to announce that the Julius Wess Award 2024 will been given to Prof. Dr. Glennys Farrar (New York University) in recognition of her fundamental contributions to particle physics – particularly QCD, supersymmetry phenomenology and dark matter, including scaling laws revealing the physical reality of quarks – and for major contributions in astroparticle physics and pioneering work revealing the structure of the Galactic magnetic field.
The presentation of the award will take place on December 18, 2024.
Information and registration
Glennys Farrar is a distinguished Collegiate Professor of Physics and holds the Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professorship at New York University. She earned a B.A. in Physics in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1971, where she was the first woman to do so. Farrar held positions at Princeton and Caltech before joining the faculty at Rutgers University in 1979. In 1998, she moved to NYU, where she served as a Chair of the Physics Department. In 2001, she founded the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, directing it for seven years. Farrar has recently chaired the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society and was a member of the Snowmass 2021 Steering Committee. A Fellow of both the APS and AAAS, Farrar has received Sloan, Guggenheim, and Simons Fellowships. She serves on advisory panels for NASA, NSF, and the European Research Council. She was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2023, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.
Prof. Farrar’s work spans a broad range of particle and astroparticle physics topics, and has made seminal contributions in a number of areas. She helped demonstrate the physical presence of quarks in matter. She pioneered the phenomenology of searches for supersymmetry in the pre-LHC era, where she notably worked out the phenomenological consequences of stable gluinos and consequently set stringent limits on this scenario. Since the start of this millennium, she has focused on the physics of high-energy cosmic rays. She has made seminal contributions to the modelling of the galactic magnetic field, including estimates of the model uncertainties. This led her to discover an unexpected large-scale poloidal component of the Milky Way's magnetic field. The galactic magnetic field map is essential in relating the arrival direction of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays to their cosmic sources' direction in the sky. In her work on the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, she identified the first clear examples of stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes. She proposed that transient events might be the primary source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. As a member of the Pierre Auger Collaboration, she co-authored a pivotal paper on multi-messenger observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 and recently a paper reporting the coincident arrival of an astrophysical neutrino with a tidal disruption event. With her students and postdocs, Farrar has placed critical indirect constraints on the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Given her extensive and pioneering contributions to particle physics and astrophysics, Prof. Glennys Farrar is a highly deserving recipient of the Julius Wess Award.