Ani Aprahamian

Aprahamian joined the faculty of the Physics Department and the Nuclear Science Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in 1989.[5][3] Aprahamian was the only female nuclear physicist at Notre Dame for 27 years.[3]

She was the director of Notre Dame's Nuclear Science Laboratory from 2001 to 2006 and chair of Notre Dame's Physics Department in 2003–2006.[9] As of 2014, she had mentored some 10 postdoctoral fellows and 17 graduate students.[5] She is currently the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Physics.[3]

At the lab, Aprahamian led her team of 20 physicists' research on the overlap between nuclear physics and astrophysics using two particle accelerators.[3]

Aprahamian has served on U.S. and international committees on nuclear science.[7] Aprahamian is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) since 1999[10] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 2008.[11][5] Between 2006 and 2008 she was the program director for nuclear physics and particle & nuclear astrophysics at the National Science Foundation in Washington.[9][3] In 2014 she served as a member of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee of the United States Department of Energy.[9][12] In the same year she served as chair of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics.[9]

In 2016–17 she served as co-chair U.S. Electron–ion collider Facility Study.[13]

She was a member of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics executive committee,[14] the American Chemical Society's Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology.[5] She has also served as chair of the scientific council at GANIL, the French national nuclear physics research center.[3] She was on the advisory board of Physics Today, the magazine of the American Institute of Physics.[5]

Aprahamian "holds deep feelings for Armenia."[4] She was elected a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia in 2008.[1][5] In November 2017 she met Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan.[15] She was appointed director of the Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (Yerevan Physics Institute, YerPhI) in April 2018.[7][6][16] She became the first woman and the first diaspora Armenian to hold the position.[6][7] In September 2018 she declared that a cyclotron will be put into operation for medical use.[17] It was put into operation in July 2019 and is used primarily for positron-emission tomography (PET) scans in cancer detection. Aprahamian stated: "This is a game changer for Armenia."[4] In a 2019 interview she stated that Armenia needs a "major reorganization" in science and that the country's "biggest challenges are in creating the opportunities and rewards that enable young scientists to stay in Armenia and to thrive here instead of traveling abroad."[18]

In April 2020 Aprahamian and her team at the Alikhanyan Laboratory developed an ozone generator which can sterilize areas of up to 140 cubic meters every hour to help fight COVID-19.[19]