This year, Dr. Moritz Pascal Reiter from the II. Physikalisches Institut of the Justus Liebig University in Gießen 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 Christoph Scheidenberger and vice-president Professor Wolfram Korten took place in February 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 two scientists were honored with a GENCO Membership Award:  Prof. Dr. Dolores Cortina-Gil from the university in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) for her significant involvement in pioneering reaction experiments with relativistic radioactive beams to pin down single particle structure information of exotic nuclei from  the study of weakly and deeply bound nucleons and for her exceptional contributions to the realization of the CALIFA detector and Prof. Dr. Andrey Popeko from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia) for his essential contributions to the discovery of the elements darmstadtium, roentgenium, and copernicium at SHIP, the development of a long-term strategy for superheavy element research, for the design of a second-generation in-flight separators for the “Dubna SHE factory”, and many important findings on nuclear structure and chemical properties of superheavy elements.

Dr. Moritz Pascal Reiter was awarded for his impressive research achievements in the areas of nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure physics, using a  multiple-reflection time-of-flight mass spectrometer, which he implemented at the TITAN experiment of TRIUMF (Vancouver, Canada) and which is a game-changer, opening-up multiple new venues for exciting mass measurements, especially on very short-lived nuclei. Already in the first two years of operation about 200 isotopes could be studied.