J-Lab scientist to receive nuclear physics prize

Volker D. Burkert, a scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, aka the Jefferson Lab, has been chosen to receive the 2025 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics, the lab announced Wednesday.

Burkert has worked at the U.S. Department of Energy lab for 39 years of its 40-year history, and is being recognized for his work in developing “high-performance instrumentation for large acceptance spectrometers that have enabled breakthroughs in fundamental nuclear physics through electroproduction measurements of exclusive processes,” according to the prize citation. The American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics awards the Bonner Prize annually to recognize experimental research in nuclear physics.

In laymen’s terms, Burkert has led and shaped physics research at the lab for years, and was instrumental in coming up with the concept for a high-precision detector at the lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a tool that lets scientists discover more about the structure of protons and neutrons. The detector, which operated at the lab from 1997 to 2012, could measure large amounts of momentum and angles of particles produced in electron-proton collisions within the CEBAF.

A native of Ellwangen, Germany, Burkert earned his doctorate at the University of Bonne in 1975, and in 1985, he came to the Jefferson Lab for the first time to participate in a workshop defining the scope of the CEBAF science program. By that fall, he had joined the lab as a staff scientist, and he and colleagues Latifa Eouadrhiri and Francois-Xavier Girod made a discovery about the proton’s physical pressure distribution that was published in the science journal Nature.

Burkert was named the state’s outstanding scientist in 2019, and he has been a principal staff scientist in the J-Lab’s Experimental Nuclear Physics division, as well as a member of the Electron-Ion Collider’s leadership team, since 2020.

“Naturally, I am thrilled about receiving the award, though mindful that, while individual initiative is important, it is also an award that honors the science achievements of the research teams and of Jefferson Lab’s discoveries in nuclear science,” Burkert said in a statement. “None of this would have been possible without the generous funding of cutting-edge science by the U.S. Department of Energy.”

The prize will be presented at a future American Physical Society meeting and includes an award of $10,000 and a certificate citing Burkert’s scientific contributions.