Early career researcher receives prestigious award
Dr Hannah Price, a Birmingham Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, received a University Founders' Award at the Chancellor's Dinner held on Thursday 12 July.
Dr Hannah Price (centre) receives the Aston Webb Award for Outstanding Early-Career Academic from Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Eastwood
Dr Hannah Price, a Birmingham Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, received a University Founders’ Award at the Chancellor’s Dinner held on Thursday 12 July.
Dr Hannah Price is this year’s recipient of The Aston Webb Award for Outstanding Early-Career Academic. These awards are a reflection of the excellent work being carried out by colleagues across the College. The Founders’ Awards recognise the very best academic work from across the University’s broad spectrum, which has significantly contributed to the advancement of the University’s reputation both nationally and internationally.
Dr Price is an accomplished young scientist whose impact and potential has already been recognised through her Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Based in the School of Physics and Astronomy, Hannah works in an area that incorporates both physics and mathematics, called topology.
Her research has been transformational as she continues to explore what happens in higher dimensions. Her ability to work at the interface between experiment and theory is impressive. Her work appears in high impact journals such as Nature, and is highly cited.
Dr Price's research is focuses on two two areas: developing new theoretical tools for solving longstanding problems; and proposing how to realise topological effects using synthetic dimensions. In 2016, she directly collaborated with experimentalists to help them make the first measurement of the Berry curvature of an energy band in an optical system. She has also developed techniques to artificially simulate extra spatial dimensions, allowing us to start exploring these fundamental questions in the laboratory. Dr Price explains the significance of this work in her Birmingham Brief, Leaving Flatland: looking into a fourth dimension in the lab.
The Founders’ Awards are named after some of Birmingham’s most influential benefactors, and demonstrate that their vision of ground-breaking research with local, national and global impact is as alive today as it was when the University was founded in 1900.