Tao Han was honored by the American Physical Society

Tao Han, Distinguished Professor of High Energy Physics in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has won the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2025 Meenakshi Narain Mentoring Award.

The APS is a nonprofit organization representing more than 50,000 physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industries internationally. Their Meenakshi Narain Mentoring Award recognizes exceptional mentoring in particle physics. The mentoring recognized could be in the form of teaching, research, or science-related activities, and the award is intended to acknowledge current and career-spanning achievements.

Tao Han was recognized for “outstanding mentoring, sustained and caring early-career advising, and a quarter century cultivating the welcoming and supportive Phenomenology symposium,” said the APS.

Han’s research is on elementary particle physics theory, focusing on high-energy collider physics and in connection to astro-particle physics and cosmology. He has published a number of highly-cited research papers in his career, including one which has been cited in more than 1,000 other studies since.

“I am really happy to receive this high recognition by the American Physical Society, Division of Particles and Fields,” said Han. “I consider it as an award for the large number of talented and devoted students and postdocs who I have the luck to work with in the past three decades, both from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pittsburgh. It has been my pursuit to create a welcoming and supportive environment, or an institute, for our junior colleagues.”