Kyle Leach wins 2025 Francis M. Pipkin Award

Kyle Leach, associate professor of physics, was honored with the 2025 Francis M. Pipkin Award by the American Physical Society (APS). 

Leach was awarded “for initiating and establishing new measurement techniques using rare-isotope-doped superconducting sensors as sensitive probes of fundamental physics in the electroweak sector.”

The Francis M. Pipkin Award recognizes exceptional research accomplishments by an early-career scientist in the interdisciplinary area of precision measurement and fundamental constant and encourages the wide dissemination of the research results. This biennial award is given every odd-number year and consists of $3,000 plus support of travel expenses to the APS meeting at which the award is conferred.

"I am truly honored to receive this award from the APS,” Leach said. “It has been a pleasure driving these new scientific directions with our wonderful students, postdocs and senior collaborators over the past several years.  We have had a tremendous amount of fun working together, and I am proud that our research in this area has brought together a diverse international team from several scientific disciplines, most notably subatomic physics and quantum engineering. I would like to extend my thanks to the APS, the Topical Group on Precision Measurements and Fundamental Constants (GPMFC), the agencies that have funded our work in these areas, and the institutions and facilities that I have had the pleasure of working at."

Leach, who holds a PhD from the University of Guelph, is focused on solving the major underlying questions that remain in better understanding the subatomic world. He heads the Electroweak Interactions Group, which conducts research at Mines, TRIUMF (Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Vancouver), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University. He has receives multiple honors for his work, including being named to the inaugural cohort of experimental physicists from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. 

APS is a scientific membership organization committed to advancing physics and creating a welcoming professional home for the world’s physics community. The Francis M. Pipkin Award was established by APS in 1997 by GPMFC in memory of Pipkin, an enthusiastic and active member of the topical group whose wide interests in physics included experiments in condensed matter, nuclear, high energy and atomic, molecular and optical physics, always with a special interest in precision measurements.