Berkeley Lab

IEEE PAST Award for Axel Huebl

Axel Huebl at podium giving award talk

Axel gives his acceptance speech at NAPAC 2022. (Credit: Jason Collin/NAPAC2022)

Axel Huebl, a Research Software Engineer in ATAP’s Accelerator Modeling Program, has been honored with the IEEE PAST Doctoral Student Award.

The award is bestowed by the Particle Accelerator Science and Technology (PAST) committee of the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It recognizes significant and innovative technical contributions to the field of particle accelerator science and technology as demonstrated in a student’s doctoral thesis.

He received the award August 11 at the 2022 North American Particle Accelerator Conference.

Huebl was honored “for outstanding contributions to the modeling of laser-ion accelerators by pioneering full-geometry modeling on GPUs that led to first-of-a-kind quantitative predictions matching experimental results, and far reaching community building for establishing open standards in plasma acceleration modeling.”

He also gave an invited talk, “Next Generation Computational Tools for the Modeling and Design of Particle Accelerators at Exascale,” at the conference.

Sandra Biedron presents plaque to Axel Huebl

Prof. Sandra Biedron, NAPAC2022 Chair, presents plaque to Axel at awards ceremony. (Credit: Jason Collin/NAPAC2022)

He earned his PhD from Technische Universität Dresden while working at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. (The thesis for which he was honored, “PIConGPU: Predictive Simulations of Laser-Particle Accelerators with Manycore Hardware,” is available online.) After HZDR, he came to Berkeley Lab as a postdoctoral scholar, joining our career research staff in 2020.

With a background in both the physics and the computer-science aspects of modeling, he researches, oversees, and participates in the development and integration of codes (computer programs) that run on high performance computers to simulate particle accelerators, laser beams, and laser plasmas. You can find the latest open-science particle accelerator modeling software from Huebl and his colleagues on GitHub.