Alumnus Riccardo Comin receives CLS Bancroft PhD Thesis Award

Posted: May 27, 2014

Congratulations to Dr. Riccardo Comin, who recently completed his PhD under supervisor Dr. Andrea Damascelli, for receiving the the G. Michael Bancroft PhD Thesis Award from the Canadian Light Source. This annual award is given to a graduate student who generates the strongest published work using data collected at the Canadian Light Source synchrontron, located at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

You can access Riccardo’s thesis through the UBC digital repository.

“It’s a great honour. Being awarded the Bancroft thesis prize is a fantastic acknowledgement of the quality of my research and the many years of efforts and dedication to this fascinating project”, said Riccardo.

At the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national centre for synchrotron research, Riccardo “conducts experiments on the soft X-ray REIXS beamline where he and CLS scientists investigated the tendency of mobile electrons in superconductors to arrange themselves into static, ordered pattern, in a wave-like fashion, instead of freely running around the material like they normally would in a metal.”

Riccardo received the award and a $3,000 cash prize at the CLS Annual Users’ Meeting (May 1-2).

“I would like to thank my supervisor at UBC, Andrea Damascelli, for his continuous guidance during my PhD project and for steering me into this exciting research direction,” added Riccardo. “A very special mention also goes to George Sawatzky, for teaching me the tricks and the beauty of resonant X-ray methods and for further motivating me to pursue studies at the CLS; and last but not least, a heartfelt acknowledgement to REIXS beamline scientists Feizhou He and Ronny Sutarto who have done an instrumental job over the years by developing, maintaining, and upgrading the world-class REIXS facility.”

Both Riccardo and his PhD supervisor Andrea were mentioned in a recent article, “Scientists May Have Decoded One of the Secrets to Superconductors” in the Quanta Magazine of the Simons Foundation (reprinted on Wired.com). Riccardo now works as a post-doc with the Sargent group at the University of Toronto.

Congratulations again Riccardo!

For the complete media release from the Canadian Light Source, and more information about the G. Michael Bancroft PhD Thesis Award, visit the Canadian Light Source website.