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Engineering professor receives IEEE Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award

November 6, 2017 - By Kim Delker

Sandra Biedron, a research professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award.

Sandra

The award, given by the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, will be presented at the 2018 International Particle Accelerator Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, in May. The award goes to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development of particle accelerator science and technology.

Edl Schamiloglu, associate dean for research in the School of Engineering and a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said Biedron, who joined UNM this fall, will be expanding the School’s reach in applied electromagnetics into the accelerator technology area. She is bringing support from Los Alamos National Laboratory and will be bringing support from other accelerator labs, he said.

For more than 20 years, Biedron’s research has been predominately focused around many aspects of particle accelerators and their applications supplemented by her interests in lasers, RF devices, intelligent controls, chemical detection and environmental engineering. 

Biedron obtained a Ph.D. in accelerator physics from Lund University in Sweden and her bachelor's in chemistry and biology with a minor in mathematics from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill. Throughout her career, she has held key positions at Argonne National Laboratory, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste and in academia. Also, while in academia, she served as deputy lead engineer for the integration and test of an innovative naval prototype through a Boeing contract for the U.S. Navy.

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a senior member of the Optical Society of America, a senior member of IEEE, a Fellow of the SPIE and a member of the Italian Optical Society. In 2010, she was presented a Letter of Commendation by the chief of naval research for her technical efforts while at Argonne, and in 2013 she was honored with the George T. Abell Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Award for the College of Engineering at Colorado State University. In 2015, she was inducted into District 230’s Legacy Hall, established by a charitable foundation in Illinois high school District 230, for her contributions to science and technology.

Previous recipients of this award have gone to prominent accelerator scientists and engineers around the globe, including now-U.S. Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois in 1999 for his contributions at Fermilab to magnet technologies that contributed to discoveries such as the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter; Stephen Milton in 2003, now division leader of Accelerator Operations and Technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for his contributions to coherent light source technologies that have contributed to the development of light source research infrastructures worldwide; and in 1995 to a key founder to the accelerator field, Pierre Lapostolle, retired from CERN, for development of beam dynamics and accelerator structure theory, contributing significantly to machines around the globe. 

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