Gustav Hertz Prize 2018 to Lavinia Heisenberg

Lavinia Heisenberg receives the Gustav Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) for her groundbreaking contributions to the development of gravitational theories. With her work, in particular with that on a generalized, Proca-like Lagrangian density for vector fields on curved spacetimes and their cosmological relevance, she has opened up a new direction for gravitational research. In addition, she works on a wide range of other problems in cosmological and gravitational theories.

Lavinia Heisenberg studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and received her doctorate in 2014 from the University of Geneva, for a dissertation on alternative gravitation theories that received several awards. From Geneva, she first moved to the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) and the Oskar Klein Centre in Stockholm as a postdoctoral fellow and then joined the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich as a Nominated Junior Fellow, where she collaborates in particular with her academic mentor Alexandre Refregier (Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics) and with Charalampos Anastasiou (Institute for Theoretical Physics).

The award will be presented in March 2018 during the DPG Annual Meeting in Erlangen.

(Text translated and adapted from a external page DPG announcement.)