DZero collaborator awarded APS Fellowship

DZero collaborator Meenakshi Narain is a 2007 APS fellow in the Division of Particles and Fields.

Last week, DZero collaborator Meenakshi Narain of Brown University was elected an American Physical Society Fellow in the Division of Particles & Fields, an honor bestowed annually on only one-half of one percent of the APS total membership. Narain was elected for her important contributions to the measurement of the properties of the top quark.

"I am really honored by this recognition from my colleagues," Narain said. "I thank the DZero collaboration and Fermilab for the opportunity to contribute to the discovery of the top quark and to study its properties."

"We congratulate her," said Dmitri Denisov, DZero co-spokesman. "We feel that this is also a success story for DZero, for the Tevatron and for Fermilab."

Narain began her tenure at Fermilab in 1991 as a postdoc. She joined the DZero experiment before its first collisions and collaborated in the discovery of the top quark in 1995.

"She was deeply involved in every area from developing tools and software to the discovery itself," said Denisov.

After the top quark's discovery, Narain continued to study the particle and its properties, recently contributing to the search that produced the first evidence of the single top production. She also worked on the DZero tracking trigger upgrade for Run IIb."As co-manager of the track trigger upgrade, she kept the project on time and under budget," said co-spokesman Darien Wood. "This trigger was running and being used for physics from the very beginning of the run."

In recent years, Narain has split her focus between DZero and the CMS experiment. She is a co-leader of one of the new LPC physics groups based on the topology of events that will come from CMS.

"It is nice to finish something I started a decade and a half ago, and to continue with that knowledge at the LHC," Narain said. She looks forward to exciting physics in the near future at both the Tevatron and the LHC.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

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