The LSU Alumni Association 2025 Distinguished Dissertation Award in Science, Engineering and Technology has been awarded to Kevin Becker, a 2025 PhD alumnus in physics who conducted research in the LSU theoretical nuclear physics group under the mentorship of Associate Professor Kristina Launey. This highly competitive award recognizes truly exceptional doctoral students across the university whose research and writing demonstrate superior scholarship.

Becker’s dissertation, “How the Inter-Nucleon Force Shapes Emergent Collectivity and Imparts Uncertainties in Ab Initio Nuclear Observables,” explores how the forces between protons and neutrons give rise to collective behavior in atomic nuclei and how uncertainties in those forces affect theoretical predictions, highlighting the outstanding research that earned this prestigious honor. 

“Nuclei are made of protons and neutrons and are very complicated objects that exhibit a great deal of emergent behavior – properties that cannot be explained by looking at their individual constituents separately,” said Becker. “This means that out of their complex dynamics, remarkably simple patterns appear. One important example is nuclear collectivity, which involves highly correlated motion between the protons and neutrons as a collective whole. As a result, most nuclei can be regarded as deformed surfaces that rotate and vibrate. I examine how these features emerge from the forces holding the nucleus together.” 

Becker’s research shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, changes in the shortest-ranged forces have a big impact on collective excitations and can enhance the favorability of extremely deformed configurations. He also traced how gaps in our knowledge of nuclear forces lead to uncertainties in theoretical predictions of nuclear reactions. 

“This quantification of uncertainties facilitates feedback between theory and experiment, which is critical as groundbreaking experiments begin to probe the physics of highly exotic nuclei,” said Becker.

“Dr. Becker’s PhD dissertation nicely balances breakthrough results and novel developments with pedagogical explanations,” said Launey. “In this work, he was not only able to skillfully connect two areas of research, namely, large-scale simulations of nuclear quantum systems and the modeling of the nuclear force, but remarkably, he discovered unexpected findings that have reshaped the traditional understanding of collective motion in nuclei. He published these results in Physical Review Letters (https://doi.org/10.1103/c3st-tp13) along with 7 additional papers, and presented them at 11 conferences, including 2 invited talks. This is a truly exceptional achievement.”

A 2019 BS alumnus from Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York, Becker received his PhD in physics from the LSU College of Science in December 2025 and now works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, currently studying astrophysical nuclear reactions. He looks to expand his background of static structure properties into their impact on dynamical processes. 

“I am proud to be with a group of remarkable experimentalists performing groundbreaking work, providing theoretical analysis to their experiments and improving our theoretical understanding from their findings,” said Becker.

###

Contact:

Mimi LaValle

LSU College of Science

225-439-5633

mlavall@lsu.edu