by Jade Boyd
Special to Rice News
Rice University theoretical physicist Evelyn Tang is an inaugural recipient of the Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
Tang, who studies living and active matter, is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and a senior scientist at Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. The prize, which includes 1,000 euros, a medal and a certificate, honors Tang’s “development of new topological and geometrical analyses that reveal fundamental physics aspects which allow the characterization of robust emergent phenomena in complex systems, from quantum phases of matter to biological systems and the brain.”
Headquartered in Brussels, the IUPAP was formed in 1922 to promote physics and international cooperation in physics. The group has more than 20 topic- and discipline-specific commissions, and it established the Interdisciplinary Early Career Scientist Prize during its centennial year to recognize research not covered by a single commission. It collectively awarded the 2022 and 2023 prizes this month to Tang and New York University’s Stefano Martiniani.
Tang joined Rice in 2021. Her research group develops theoretical frameworks for systems far from equilibrium, ranging from biological systems and the brain to quantum phases of matter. She holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in physics from Yale University, the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. Prior to joining Rice, she served as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and as an Africk Family Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her previous awards and honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award, a Simon-Berkeley Research Fellowship and a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.