Congratulations to our Breakthrough Prize Laureates!

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, which has a large number of members at UC Davis, was awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The prize was awarded “For detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider” using data collected during LHC Run 2.  

The $3 million prize is allocated to the ATLAS experiment ($1 million), the CMS experiment ($1 million), the ALICE experiment ($500,000) and the LHCb experiment ($500,000). 

The CMS prize money will be used by the collaboration to offer grants for doctoral students from member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving the students experience working at the forefront of science and expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.

This type of science requires the work of many people. At UC Davis alone, including UC Davis alumni, we have 62 laureates. We list all of them below. Congratulations to all of our past and present UC Davis members of the CMS Collaboration for this distinguished, and well-deserved honor! 

Faculty:

Richard Lander

David Pellett

Winston Ko

S. Mani Tripathi

Michael Mulhearn

John Conway

Maxwell Chertok

Robin Erbacher

Matthew Citron

Manuel Calderón de la Barca Sánchez

Senior Researchers:

Richard Breedon

John Smith

Peter Timothy Cox

Postdocs:

Sweta Baradia

Ethan Cannaert

Giovanni Mocellin

Juan Tafoya

Frank Jensen

Johan Bonilla

Fengwangdong Zhang

Rachel Yohay

Shalhout Shalhout

Justin Pilot

Sushil Chauhan

Suzy Borgia

Scott Wilbur

Christian Veelken

Ricardo Sierra Vasquez

Graduate Students:

Itzelli Salazar

Tianyi Jian

Ben Barton

Sydney Ostrom

Samantha Abbott

Hong Cai

Blanca Nino

Troy Welton

Caleb Fairchild

Wei Wei

Grace Haza

Garrett Funk

Brendan Regnery

Yao Yao

Reyer Band

Chris Brainerd

Christine McLean

Kyle Tos

Francesca Ricci-Tan

Dustin Burns

Mike Squires

Carly Kopecky

Dusty Stolp

Tia Miceli

Sho Maruyama

Evan Friis

Guillermo Breto

Rylan Conway

Michael Gardner

Chad Flores

Jared Jay

Santona Tuli

Graham Waegel

Ota Kukral

Visiting Scholar: 

Heather Folsom