Campus News
SCIPP scientist Simone Mazza honored with international physics award
Simone Mazza, an assistant research scientist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), has won an international award that recognizes contributions in the fields of fundamental interactions of matter. Mazza received the 2024 INFN Bruno Toushek Award from the Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation.
The foundation cited Mazza’s main research focus “on the study of lepton flavor universality by the observation of rare pion decays,” and his involvement in an emerging pion decay experiment called PIONEER at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.
The award given to Mazza honors the pioneering work in the fields of elementary particle physics and particle accelerators by the late Bruno Touschek, a professor at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. “The scientific collaboration between Italy and the United States has been extraordinarily fruitful, and I feel fortunate to be part of this trans-Atlantic exchange,” Mazza said in a short video of him accepting the award remotely.