Two physicists fairly new to their field who have ties to The University of Tennessee Department of Physics show great promise in their careers, according to the president of the United States.

Saskia Mioduszewski and Jian Shen won the Presidential Early Career Award, presented in a ceremony at the White House on Sept. 9. The award represents the highest honor the U.S. government bestows on scientists and engineers at the onset of their careers, according to a media release.

Mioduszewski earned her Bachelor of Science degree in physics at North Carolina State University, and she earned her doctoral at UT in 1999. As a graduate student working with professors of physics Kenneth Read and Soren Sorensen, she joined the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction experiment research team at Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, according to the media release. PHENIX investigates high-energy collisions of heavy ions and protons. Mioduszewski, who is still a part of the collaboration, was honored for her study of the properties of the unusual matter formed in extremely high-energy nuclear collisions produced at RHIC.

“We are extremely pleased on her (Mioduszewski’s) behalf,” Sorensen, head of the physics department, said. “This award shows the high quality of students we have in our graduate program.”

Shen is a member of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Condensed Matter Sciences Division. He is a close collaborator of Ward Plummer, distinguished professor in physics. Shen is soon to be an adjunct professor of physics at the university and includes UT physics graduate students in his research program. He was honored for his pioneering approach to the study of magnetism in nanostructured materials synthesis, according to the media release.

“He won for his discovery that magnetic behavior is very different from what is in our textbooks,” Plummer said. “Hopefully, this will lead to new technology, such as nonvolatile memory for computers, so that computers can turn on instantaneously without having to boot it up.”

Plummer described Shen’s research as a solution to the problem of magnetic properties becoming different once materials get smaller and smaller. Once the problem is solved, more magnetic material may be placed over a smaller area, leading to the possibility of nonvolatile memory and high-density drives in computers.