Prof. Michael Wiescher, the Freimann Professor in Nuclear Physics, has been selected to receive the membership award of the GSI Exotic Nuclei Community at a ceremony on March 5, 2015. He was invited in recognition of his outstanding scientific work.
The GSI Exotic Nuclei Community was founded at the symposium in honor of Gottfried Munzenberg at the occasion of celebrating his 60th birthday on July 11, 2000. Prof. Munzenberg is the current President of the group. While the main goal is to reward young scientists for outstanding research in nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, and other closely related fields, in 2006 they started to invite senior scientists to membership.
The central research interest of Prof. Wiescher’s group is the study of nuclear reactions important to the understanding of energy production and the origin of the elements in stars and in explosive stellar environments. Currently, the group’s research focuses on understanding nucleosynthesis in explosive hydrogen and helium burning processes that occur in novae, supernovae and accreting neutron stars. In addition, his group studies nucleosynthesis in the late stages of stellar development, in particular in AGB stars. The group investigates nuclear reactions experimentally and implements the results in large scale network calculations to simulate stellar burning conditions.
Prof. Wiescher is also the Director for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA). JINA is funded as a NSF Physics Frontier Center between the University of Notre Dame, Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory to address critical questions about the origin of heavy elements in nature or nuclear processes on compact stellar objects.