Blavatnik Award ceremony and symposium
Professor Sinead Farrington who was honoured as Physical Sciences and Engineering Laureate (first place) in the 2021 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom awards ceremony on 25th October in London.
The Blavatnik Awards are administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, of which Prof. Farrington is now a life-member. These awards are the largest unrestricted UK science prize, with an award of $100,000 for each laureate, and $30,000 for each of two additional finalists in the three categories: physical sciences and engineering, chemistry and life sciences.
Professor Farrington was presented the Physical Sciences and Engineering Laureate’s medal at a banquet hosted by Sir Leonard Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation, attended by prominent scientists and policy-makers at which she gave a talk on her research, at Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, London. An open public symposium was held the following day where Professor Farrington and her fellow laureates and finalists spoke on their subjects. Professor Farrington and the Life Sciences Laureate, also from Edinburgh - Professor Steven Brusatte from Geosciences - took part in a discussion panel with BBC Science correspondent, Victoria Gill.
Professor Farrington is based in the School’s Particle Physics Experiment research group where she holds an European Research Council (ERC) consolidator grant funding her team of postdocs and PhD students searching for Beyond Standard Model particles. She leads the UK collaboration on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She received the Blavatnik Award in recognition of her leadership of an international working group at CERN that has improved our understanding of the properties of the Higgs boson, and the development of key trigger and analysis techniques for the exploitation of Large Hadron Collider data and searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Prof Farrington commented:
High energy physics is a collaborative endeavour involving very talented individuals from around the world, working together to build machines on a grand scale, and to analyse the data they generate to help us understand how the universe works at its deepest levels. I am privileged to have been able to contribute to this endeavour and to help provide some pieces of nature’s great puzzle, and am honoured to have received this Blavatnik Award.