Ronald Bieniek Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Experimental Research

The Ronald Bieniek Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Experimental Cosmology, made possible by Dr. Bieniek's generous donations, recognizes undergraduate researchers who have made exceptional contributions to research in a CECI lab. Beyond recognizing students' exemplary work, financial support from this award helps students continue research and grow as future leaders in physics.

Dr. Ronald Bieniek graduated summa cum laude from UC Riverside in 1970 with recognition in Phi Beta Kappa. He was a UC Regents Scholar and won the Gordon Watkins Award for campus service. He then got an MA in History of Science and a PhD in physics from Harvard and held positions as Assistant Professor of Physical Science and Astronomy at U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Acting Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at University of Missouri - St. Louis, Professor and Director of New Faculty Programs at Missouri University of Science & Technology, and Professor at Marshall University. Dr. Bieniek has made ground-breaking contributions to the fundamental physics underlying atomic and molecular interactions, as well as to student education and STEM pedagogy. Thanks to his generosity, CECI recognizes students with the Ronald Bieniek Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Experimental Cosmology, helping UCR students become scientific leaders.

Awardees

Weicheng Wang

2026

Weicheng worked in Shawn Westerdale's lab, building a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) for detector R&D and for monitoring the purity of detector materials. He also developed background simulations of the (n,γ) reaction in the DUNE far detectors, and was admitted into the DUNE-Tech program.

Michael Padilla

2026

Michael was awarded as a junior working in Jon Richardson's lab to develop AI-driven design optimization approaches for future gravitational-wave detectors, such as Cosmic Explorer and future upgrades of LIGO. These facilities promise to extend our gravitational-wave view of the universe to the earliest epochs. His work has laid the foundation for the senior thesis research he plans to pursue in the next academic year on this topic. During summer 2026, Michael was selected to participate in the highly selective LIGO Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, completing a ten-week research project at Caltech.

Abigail Moreno

2025

Abigail worked in Steve Choi's lab, developing kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) for new microwave observatories. Her research focused on developing a blackbody calibration source and calculating its signal level to facilitate the optical characterization of KIDs for the CCAT Observatory. Her work is contributing to some of the first cryogenic measurements of KIDs, an emerging quantum sensor technology for observational cosmology, at UCR. With support from the award, Abigail is further exploring the cosmological capabilities of CCAT.

Sumukh Mahesh

2025

Sumukh worked in Shawn Westerdale's lab, developing technology for dark matter and neutrino detection. He applied techniques that he learned working in Jing Shi's lab, doing condensed matter physics experiment, to refurbish a thin-film evaporator used to deposit wavelength shifting films on the inner surfaces of particle detectors. Supported by this award, Sumukh also built a test stand for measuring the solubility of wavelength shifters and other additives in liquid argon, addressing key challenges for designing future low-threshold dark matter and neutrino detectors. He also studied the sensitivity of the DarkSide-20k dark matter experiment to neutrinos emitted by "failed" supernovae that collapse to black holes.

Aiden Wilkin

2024

As an undergraduate, Aiden worked in Jon Richardson's lab developing adaptive optics for the LIGO gravitational wave observatory. This award recognized his excellent achievements designing optical appartuses and allowed him to expand his work developing new technology that will allow gravitational wave observatories to observe the gravitational influence of events at the far reaches of the observable universe. After graduating from UCR, Aiden went on to pursue a PhD in physics at Stanford University.

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