Lisa Manning, a professor of physics at Syracuse University, has been named the 2018 recipient of a prestigious award gifted to young women physicists by the American Physical Society.

The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award is national prize that recognizes talented women physicists in the early stages of their career. The award includes a $2,500 in prize money and a $4,000 travel allowance that will allow Manning to speak about her research across the country at four colleges. The Maria Goeppert Mayer Award is given to women who have received their Ph.D. within the last 10 years.

“She’s working on quite a range of things with a lot of different collaborators,” said John “Jack” Laiho, an assistant professor of physics. “I think that’s really impressive, that sort of breadth of the research. She’s one of the stars of the department.”

Manning has studied the dynamics of glassy matter and behavior of cancer cells and how they interact with one another. She’s organized and well-liked by students, Laiho said, and has worked as a physics professor since arriving at SU for the fall 2011 semester.

Karen Daniels, a physics professor at North Carolina State University, nominated Manning for the award. Daniels, who met Manning more than 10 years ago at a conference while commenting on her graduate research, sought letters of recommendation on Manning’s behalf for the award.

“It is really easy in these fields to feel like an imposter, that you aren’t smart enough or don’t really belong, and that interaction with Karen made me feel like I really did belong,” said Manning, who was originally announced as the award recipient in late October.

Manning received the award specifically for developing an understanding of flow in disordered materials, ranging from metallic glasses to biological tissues, according to a press release from the American Physical Society.

“You can walk on sand at the beach, which means it behaves like a solid, but when you pick it up, it flows through your fingers like a fluid,” Manning said. “We are trying to understand how that transition from solid-like to fluid-like behavior emerges from properties of the sand grains.”

Manning also studies why cancer cells form in tissue. A group she is working on those studies with is both theoretical and computational, she said, meaning it uses mathematics and computer simulations for projects studying the disease.

The award is named after Maria Goeppert Mayer, one of only two women to have won the Nobel Prize in physics. It aims to recognize women physicists and increase awareness of their research.

Manning has won several other awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the Statistics Physics Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Simons Investigator award and  a Scialog award, among other recognitions.

Despite her passion for physics, Manning did not start her career with the intention of ever becoming a professor.

“I thought I might end up as a researcher in industry or maybe as a science journalist,” she said. “But I discovered that I really enjoyed mentoring as an undergraduate student and teaching as a graduate student, and so being a professor seemed like the perfect combination of being able to teach and do research.”

Published on November 12, 2017 at 11:30 pm

Contact Jessi: jmsopori@syr.edu