This year, Dr. Yusuke Tsunoda from the Center for Nuclear Study at the University of Tokyo received the FAIR GENCO Award for young scientists. The award is sponsored by the FAIR-GSI Exotic Nuclei Community (GENCO) and endowed with 1,000 Euro. The bestowal by GENCO president Professor Dr. Christoph Scheidenberger and vice-president Professor Dr. Nasser Kalantar-Nayestanaki took place on Thursday, March 1, 2017 in a special colloquium in the framework of the yearly GENCO meeting at FAIR and GSI. Every year, the FAIR-GSI Exotic Nuclei Community (GENCO) presents its Young Scientist Award to a young researcher at the beginning of their scientific career. The international GENCO jury, composed of seven renowned nuclear scientists, elects the winner in a competitive procedure, where several candidates, working in theory or experiment, are evaluated. Furthermore five scientists were honoured with a GENCO Membership Award.

Dr. Yusuke Tsunoda receives the Young Scientist Award for the invention of the so-called T-Plot method. This visualization method is the key for understanding and grasping the essence of complex many-body quantum systems like atomic nuclei. He developed this method to display mathematical solutions that can be assigned to different states and shapes of atomic nuclei. It helps to interpret and understand experimental results and is becoming a standard method in the study of the structure of exotic nuclei. The T-Plot method attracts great attention in the scientific community worldwide.

The five scientists assigned with the GENCO Membership Award are:

• Professor Angela Bracco (INFN Milano) for her important contributions to the study of collective pygmy excitations and for her leadership role in NuPECC in Europe.

• Professor Paolo Giubellino (GSI and FAIR) for outstanding contributions to the strategic development of the high-level physics program of GSI and to the ALICE experiment at CERN, which is an important asset of the GSI research portfolio.

• Professor Thomas Glasmacher (MSU - FRIB) for exploring rare isotopes with new experimental techniques involving gamma-rays and for opening new horizons with design and construction of the FRIB facility.

• Professor Olof Tengblad (CSIC Madrid) for advancing the nuclear-reaction program using relativistic radioactive beams and for remarkable findings in the reaction mechanisms and structure of drip-line nuclei.

• Professor Remco Zegers (MSU – FRIB) for excellent achievements on charge-exchange reactions in connection with Giant Monopole and Giant Dipole Resonances, respectively, and the development of new techniques to study and disentangle these resonances using radioactive beams.