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February 20, 2025

Penn State physicist honored with 2025 Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize

Penn State physicist honored with 2025 Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize

Jacob Bourjaily, associate professor of physics, was honored with the Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize for 2025 by the Niels Bohr International Academy (NBIA), in Copenhagen, Denmark. The prize is awarded annually to an exceptionally talented young individual who has had very high impact in research and has or has had close connections to the Niels Bohr Institute. Bourjaily was presented the prize by Lars Kann-Rasmussen, former chairman of the board of VKR Holding and the Villum Foundation, at an award ceremony on February 24 that was attended by the head of the Niels Bohr Institute Joachim Mathiesen, Deputy Dean of Research Lise Arleth, and NBIA Director Poul Henrik Damgaard.

“I am extremely grateful for the generosity and support I was given during the nearly ten years I spent at the Niels Bohr Institute and International Academy,” Bourjaily said. “Through the generosity and support of the Danish people and the Niels Bohr Institute, I was able to build and lead the world’s largest team of postdoctoral scholars studying exciting new developments in quantum field theory. It is a great honor to be awarded this prize for the work that was started there.”

Bourjaily was awarded the prize "for his fundamental and original contributions to quantum field theory, guided by an on-going quest for both simplifications and deeper understanding."

Bourjaily is a theoretical physicist whose research revolves around quantum field theory — the basic theoretical and mathematical framework that combines quantum mechanics with relativity. He works to revolutionize how quantum field theory is used to make predictions for experiments. Among the most important of these predictions are scattering amplitudes, which encode the predicted relative likelihoods of all possible outcomes of any experiment. Bourjaily’s research has led to great advances in the ability to make such predictions and in understanding the mathematical form that these predictions take.

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The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

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