Jacob Bourjaily receives Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize 2025
Jacob Bourjaily receives Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize 2025
At an award ceremony on February 24. former NBIA Associate Professor Jacob Bourjaily received the Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize for 2025. The Prize was presented by Lars Kann-Rasmussen to Jacob Bourjaily in Auditorium A following speeches by Deputy Dean of Research Lise Arleth, Head of Niels Bohr Institute Joachim Mathiesen, and NBIA Director Poul Henrik Damgaard.
Jacob Bourjaily finished his undergraduate studies at University of Michigan with Highest Honors in Physics and Mathematics. He was awarded a Marshall Fellowship to spend a year at Cambridge University where he earned a Master's Degree in Mathematics before moving on to Princeton University from where he received his PhD in Physics in 2011. He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows 2011-14 before joining NBIA on a personal fellowship from the Danish Science Research Council. He received a Villum Young Investigator grant in 2017, followed two years later by an ERC Starting grant from the EU. He took up is current position as Associate Professor at Penn State University in 2020.
Jacob Bourjaily's research is characterized by a drive to step beyond the boundaries of the established formalism of relativistic quantum field theory. By a combination of new developments in mathematics with parallel new understanding of the structure of scattering amplitudes, Jacob Bourjaily's research is changing the understanding of scattering amplitudes. He has followed up on the resulting reformulations of quantum field theory computations to characterize the set of mathematical functions that contribute to the perturbation theory expansion of quantum mechanical observables at cutting-edge high orders. This work is still on-going but has already now impacting the way scientists perform calculations for scattering processes such as those occurring at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
Jacob Bourjaily receives the Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize 2025 "for his fundamental and original contributions to quantum field theory, guided by an on-going quest for both simplifications and deeper understanding."