Emeritus Professor Sau Lan Wu is awarded the 2026 Division of Particles and Fields of the Mexican Physical Society Medal

announcement of medal award
Emeritus Professor Sau Lan Wu will receive the 2026 Division of Particles and Fields of the Mexican Physical Society Medal, the Division’s highest distinction.

The medal recognizes Prof. Wu’s fundamental contributions to three discoveries that transformed our understanding of matter:
– the J/ψ particle, which provided decisive evidence for the existence of the charm quark
– the gluon, the mediator of the strong interaction, and
– the Higgs boson, the observable manifestation of the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles.

Isabel Pedraza, the President of the Division of Particles and Fields of the Mexican Physical Society, writes: “This recognition reflects not only your exceptional scientific achievements, but also the profound and lasting impact of your mentorship and generosity on the international scientific community and, particularly, on the development of particle physics in Mexico.”

The award ceremony will take place on Friday, October 23, 2026, at 13:00, in the Projections Room of the Edificio Carolino, located at Calle 3 Oriente 407, Puebla, Mexico. The ceremony will be held as part of the XXI Mexican School on Particles and Fields [http://indico.nucleares.unam.mx/e/XXIMSPF]

Congratulations to Maggie Ju for being featured in today’s Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Student Spotlight!

headshot of Maggie
Maggie Ju, a second-year physics PhD student at UW–Madison, is featured in the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium’s September 14 Student Spotlight.
Maggie is a recipient of a WSGC Graduate and Professional Research Fellowship and works with Professor Melinda Soares-Furtado on young variables (including brown dwarfs and free-floating planets!) in the Orion Nebula Cluster. She uses near-infrared time series observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. In the future, her project will also explore disk evolution using millimeter-wavelength data in collaboration with Abygail Waggoner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy. Alongside her research, Maggie engages the public as an Outreach Fellow and a docent at UW–Madison’s physics museum.
Congratulations, Maggie!