Marija V has been awarded the 2017 John Dawson PhD Thesis Prize for her thesis “Extreme laser-matter interactions: multi-scale PIC modelling from the classical to the QED perspective” at IST. The “John Dawson Thesis prize” is awarded on a biannual basis for the best PhD thesis in the area of compact plasma based accelerators driven by ultra-intense laser pulses. The prize was awarded at the Laser and Plasma Accelerators Workshop held at Jeju Island in South Korea, from the 27th of August to the 1st of September 2017. The prize is named after John Dawson, the founder of the field of plasma based particle acceleration. He worked and lived in Los Angeles.

Marija Vranic is a Serbian researcher from Belgrade now working at IST. She obtained her undergraduate physics degree in Belgrade and moved to Portugal to do her PhD at GoLP with Luis OS on the topic of ‘’Extreme laser-matter interactions: multi-scale PIC modelling from the classical to the QED perspective’’. After the PhD, she also worked for the Extreme Light Infrastructure in Prague, Chech Republic. Marija is currently an FCT Post-Doctoral fellow at IST, Lisbon.