The American Physical Society selected Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Yuri Batygin and Christopher Ticknor as 2026 Outstanding Referees for their work reviewing manuscripts for publication in the society’s journals.
Recognizing a tiny fraction of the roughly 56,000 referees who reviewed papers over the past year, the editors selected 156 honorees based on the quality, number and timeliness of their reports, without regard for APS membership, country of origin or field of research.
Who they are:
Batygin, of the Lab’s Accelerator Operations & Technology division, uses his expertise in the physics of high-intensity particle beams to support the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, a user facility for open and national security science.
- He has contributed to large-scale accelerator projects throughout his career and authored publications on particle beam physics and accelerator science.
- His doctorates are from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia.
In the Lab’s Theoretical division, Ticknor develops high-explosives models and calibrations for high-performance computing codes.
- He was elected an APS fellow in 2023 “for theoretical and computational advances in the properties of matter under extreme conditions, and for leadership in guiding new research in these fields.”
- His doctorate in physics is from the University of Colorado Boulder and JILA in the theory of quantum scattering.
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