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ALICE honours its thesis award winners

Fabrizio Grosa and Arild Velure are the young laureates of the 2020 award

ALICE thesis award laureates
ALICE Spokesperson, Luciano Musa (centre) presents the ALICE Thesis Award to Fabrizio Grosa (bottom right on the left screen) and Arild Velure (right) in the presence of Collaboration Board Chair Silvia Masciocchi, and the Chairs of the Thesis Award Committee, Giuseppe Bruno and Philippe Crochet (Image: CERN)

On 23 September, the ALICE collaboration celebrated its best PhD theses, which are selected based on the excellence of the results obtained, the quality of the thesis manuscript, and the importance of the contribution to the collaboration.

Out of the 11 outstanding PhD theses received by the selection committee, two theses stood out: Fabrizio Grosa’s, entitled “Strange and non-strange D-meson production in pp, p-Pb, and Pb-Pb collisions with ALICE at the LHC”, and Arild Velure’s - “Design, Verification and Testing of a Digital Signal Processor for Particle Detectors”.

The winners were congratulated by ALICE Spokesperson, Luciano Musa, the Collaboration Board Chair, Silvia Masciocchi, and the Chairs of the Thesis Committee, Giuseppe Bruno and Philippe Crochet. Luciano awarded the certificates and prizes to Fabrizio and Arild, who then presented their work.

Fabrizio Grosa (Turin Polytechnic) analysed vast data on the production of several particle species in different colliding systems as part of his doctoral research. His results contributed to five published ALICE papers, with two more on the way. Fabrizio has also made significant contributions to the upgrade project of the ALICE Inner Tracking System for the forthcoming LHC runs, working on alignment procedures and physics performance studies.

Hailing from Bergen University, Arild Velure worked on the design of the so-called SAMPA ASIC, a complex mixed-signal chip that has become the state-of-the-art readout for gaseous detectors like the ALICE Time Projection Chamber and the muon tracking chambers. He made significant contributions to the ASIC specifications as well as to the design and implementation of the detector front-end cards. Arild’s research is of paramount importance to the success of the forthcoming ALICE high-rate data-taking campaign.