It is our great pleasure to announce that Dr. Rivka Bekenstein, a graduate student of the Technion physics department, has won the prestigious Deborah Jin Award of the American Physical Society (APS) for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in AMO (atomic, molecular or optical) Physics. Rivka completed her PhD in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Moti Segev, studying gravity models with optical setups both to contribute to the fundamental understanding of gravity models and to photonics applications. Her most important contribution is the first simulation of the Newton-Schrodinger system. She has been awarded the prize on her research titled: "Emulating gravity with linear and nonlinear optical settings". This annual award is presented to one individual and Rivka is the first Israeli graduate to ever win. In 2015 Rivka won the IPS prize for a graduate student in theoretical physics awarded to one graduate a year.
Rivka is currently during her second year as an ITAMP (institute for theoretical atomic, molecular and optical physics) post-doc at Harvard University, working with Prof. Mikhail Lukin. She is studying quantum information science and is planning to relate the quantum optical setups she is working on to gravity models that take quantum effects into account. Her goal is to explore the relation between quantum physics and gravity in theory and in experiments. Congratulations Rivka we wish you all the best!