ORNL researcher is the recipient of the 2026 FRIB Theory Achievement Award for Early Career Researchers. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Matthias Heinz, a nuclear theorist at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was given the 2026 FRIB Theory Achievement Award for Early Career Researchers, presented by the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University.
The FRIB Achievement Award for Early Career Researchers honors outstanding original contributions to nuclear physics through work conducted at or relating to FRIB by scientists early in their careers.
Announced by the FRIB Users Organization Executive Committee and the FRIB Theory Alliance Executive Board, Heinz was recognized “for exceptional contributions to ab initio nuclear theory and its direct application to FRIB science.” Award recipients will present their research during the plenary session at the 2026 Low Energy Community Meeting, August 12 – 14 and receive a stipend for their participation.
“It is an honor to be recognized for my work at ORNL and beyond,” Heinz said. “I am grateful to all my collaborators for fruitful and exciting research projects in nuclear physics.”
Heinz joined ORNL in 2024 as a Distinguished Staff Fellow in the Advanced Computing for Nuclear, Particles, and Astrophysics Group at the laboratory’s National Center for Computational Sciences. His research focuses on theoretical calculations of atomic nuclei, using high-performance computing (HPC) to perform first-principles, or ab initio, computations that aim to predict nuclear properties directly from the underlying interactions among protons and neutrons.
Heinz’s work is also supported by the ORNL Physics Division as part of the NUCLEI collaboration of the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program.
The FRIB research facility is used to produce and study rare isotopes — short-lived, hard-to-create atomic nuclei with uncommon configurations of protons and neutrons. These can reveal how nuclei emerge from basic nuclear interactions, how heavy elements form in the cosmos, how fundamental particles interact with nuclei, and how nuclear science can be harnessed for practical benefits in areas such as healthcare, energy production, agriculture, and manufacturing.
Heinz and his group predict properties of nuclei relevant to FRIB via quantum many-body simulations using Frontier — America’s most powerful supercomputer for open science — and other HPC resources located at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).
Heinz says his early career success has been enabled and accelerated by the ORNL Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship and by access to major computing resources, including those provided by DOE’s INCITE leadership computing program.
FRIB and OLCF are DOE Office of Science user facilities. OLCF is supported by the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
