Penn Graduate Student Receives Springer Thesis Award

Kurt Brendlinger, who graduated in August 2016, worked on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider located in Geneva, Switzerland. The Penn ATLAS group is led by four faculty: Joseph Kroll, Elliot Lipeles, Hugh “Brig” Williams and Evelyn Thomson. The ATLAS collaboration consists of about 3,000 physicists; about 1,200 are graduate students. Each year the collaboration selects four to six dissertations to be recognized with an “ATLAS Thesis Award”. Kurt’s dissertation Physics with Electrons in the ATLAS Detector was selected as one of the six dissertations to receive a 2017 ATLAS Thesis Award, and it was the one dissertation selected by the ATLAS spokesperson to be published in the series Springer Theses Recognizing Outstanding Ph.D. Research. Kurt is continuing research on ATLAS as a Fellow at DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. Since 2010 there have been 38 ATLAS thesis awards; four of these awards have gone to Penn graduate students (Michael Hance, John Alison, James Saxon in addition to Kurt) and three of these have received the special recognition of the Springer Theses Award.