Since 2009, the EMFL Board of Directors announces annually the EMFL prize for exceptional achievements in science done in high magnetic fields. An award committee selects the prize winner from the nominations received. This year, the prize went to Dr. Jake Ayres, who currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Bristol, UK. During the user meeting in Nijmegen, Jochen Wosnitza, chair of the prize committee, had the honor of presenting the prize in a traditional small prize ceremony. Jake Ayres, who performed his PhD work at HFML in Nijmegen, is a regular user of the EMFL facilities. His work is mainly focused on high-temperature superconductors. Significant results encompass his work on the in-plane magnetoresistance as well as the Hall effect under hydrostatic pressure of cuprate superconductors published in highly ranked journals. He further utilized the EMFL high magnetic fields to study the nematic iron-based superconductor FeSe and the nodal-line semimetal ZrSiS. In summary, Jake’s substantial body of experimental work, performed at EMFL facilities, has made major advances in our understanding of unconventional superconductors.
