Gabriel Orebi Gann receives ICFA Early Career Award

Mertonian Gabriel Orebi Gann (2004) has been announced as a recipient of the 2024 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Instrumentation Awards. 

Gabriel Orebi Gann, who is Associate Professor at Berkeley University, has received an Early Career Award, ‘For pioneering and developing an innovative detector technique to achieve a clear separation between scintillation and Cherenkov photons which has the potential to significantly influence the design of future neutrino experiments’.

On receiving this award, Professor Orebi Gann said,

“Receiving this award was truly humbling.  It is very much a team effort that has allowed us to make such progress in the development of this technology, with contributions from many different people, in many different fields!  I did not expect to be singled out in this way.”  

When asked about what this means for women in physics, Orebi Gann replied,

“As regards women in physics, I wish I could say this was a solved problem. I do think there is a lot more awareness than there was a decade ago but the problem is also wider than just women in physics. In the past few years I have become more involved in supporting efforts to increase diversity along other axes, for example providing research opportunities for students in colleges that don’t have graduate programs, and therefore tend to have less active research, and fewer opportunities. Berkeley has partnered  with several such institutions to bring students to our campus to give them experience in hands-on research, as well as exposure to a broad and diverse team of scientists. For me, I think the guiding light is equal opportunity. People should have the opportunity to explore, and to make up their own minds about what they wish to pursue.”

For a full list of the 2024 ICFA award winners, please visit the ICFA website.