MINERvA Receives Energy Secretary's Award of Achievement

Profs. Manly, McFarland, and Bodek have a new reason to smile. Their experiment to study neutrino scattering from nuclei, MINERvA, received the 2011 Secretary of Energy's Award of Achievement.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Rochester B.S. in Physics '70, presented the award to representatives of the MINERvA experiment and the Department of Energy Office of Science at a ceremony on April 4, 2011.

The original proposal for the MINERvA experiment was written by Profs. Bodek and McFarland in 2002. The ensuing collaboration has fifteen members, faculty, postdoctoral researchers, students and technical staff, from the University of Rochester neutrino group. Prof. McFarland and Dr. Deborah Harris, a former postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Bodek's group who is now a staff scientist at Fermilab, serve as the experiment's scientific spokespersons.

The citation for the award reads, in part,

"The MINERvA team demonstrated outstanding dedication and ingenuity in developing and implementing an extremely successful prototyping campaign that successfully integrated primary detector components fabricated at multiple, geographically diverse universities... The project team is to be commended for a job well done."

Read more about the award in Fermilab Today.