Lea Reuter receives Otto Haxel Prize

Last Monday, Lea Reuter received an Otto Haxel Prize for her PhD thesis, "Track Finding with Graph Neural Networks in the Belle II Drift Chamber."

The Otto Haxel Prize, awarded together with the German Physical Society (DPG), recognizes the three best physics dissertations each year across the University of Göttingen, the University of Heidelberg, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the three places where the nuclear physicist Otto Haxel worked.

The prize was presented at the summer festival of the KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e.V., where Lea Reuter gave a talk on her work.

Her thesis opened a new research direction in the institute, applying graph neural networks to track finding in the Belle II drift chamber and beyond. The work has resulted in a journal publication and several conference proceedings, and the algorithms she developed are being adopted by the Belle II Collaboration for use in the experiment. It has also grown into a lasting research effort in the group, forming the basis for several BSc and MSc theses.

We congratulate Lea Reuter on this well-deserved recognition.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Torben Ferber