Laudation for Dr. Moumita Maiti, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India: recipient of the Young Scientist Award 2012

Moumita Maiti graduated in physics in 2000 from Jadavpur University and received her Ph.D., also in physics, in 2006 from Visva-Bharati University, India. She started her career at this university, in association with the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) after a 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Technical university of Munich, Germany. Her main areas of interest are trace analysis, accelerator production and separation of clinically important radionuclides, especially the actinides for target alpha therapy, super heavy elements, cosmogenic and supernova produced radionuclides, and nuclear reaction mechanisms. Dr. Maiti’s CV is impressive for such a young scientist. She has already published 35 peer-reviewed scientific papers, 2 book chapters and 50 conference papers. This output also reflects her international visibility which is built on international and national collaborations in Germany, Switzerland (CERN), Hungary, and within India of course. She participated in several international conferences and already received other awards such as the best young researcher’s oral presentation award at ARCEBS-2010 in Kolkata, the best oral presentation award at NAC-IV in 2010 in Mumbai, and the Young Scientist Award 2011 at the 13th Modern Trends in Activation Analysis (MTAA-13) conference in College Station, Texas. And now she receives the YSA-2012 at the NAMLS-10. One of her nominators wrote ‘‘...the publications, awards, etc., enlighten only a part of her scientific merit. The most important side of her research works is the quality of the data generated by her. For each data point she is meticulous, because she knows that all the nuclear data will be important for application of radioisotopes in the field of nuclear medicine and biological sciences. She is careful about all sources of errors and knowledgeable about all the parameters of accelerators that can influence the data...’’. The above comments are reflected in her manuscript entitled ‘‘Nuclear and chemical data for the life sciences’’ submitted at NAMLS-10. This work touches several issues relevant to the NAMLS conference series: trends and innovations in nuclear analytical techniques for producing radioisotopes of medical interest using advanced accelerators; innovations in chemical separation techniques and speciation studies in the development of no-carrier added products; and the importance of expanding cross section data for nuclear reactions with accelerators and ensuring the reliability of the published values, which has direct impact on personal or radiological safety. In the other nomination letter we found the words: ‘‘...You will be surprised by her clean, ease style and presented results too...’’. Well, we all heard that in her Award Lecture. It is an honor and a pleasure to present, on behalf of the Young Scientist Award selection panel, the Young Scientist Award of the 10th International Conference on Nuclear Analytical Methods in the Life Sciences (NAMLS-10) to Dr. Moumita Maiti, and we hope that this award will further stimulate her so that we can enjoy her work for a long time.