AWARD 2002

"Damien Challet has received Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics from the AKSOE"

(appeared 2 May 2002 in the News Section of the Econphysics Forum)

For the pictures, please see here

During the annual conference of the AKSOE in Regensburg, 11.-14 March 2002, 
which was part of the march meeting of the German Physical Society,
Dr. Damien Challet has received the YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARD FOR SOCIO- AND
 ECONOPHYSICS. 

AKSOE (http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/~frank/AKSOE) is a section of the German
Physical Society (DPG) devoted to the "Physics of Socio-Economic
 Systems".  One of our aims is to foster research on these topics in
Germany and to coordinate our activities and those of similar societies
 across Europe.  Our objective is also to interest young physicists in
economic, urban, and social problems.

The YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARD FOR SOCIO- AND ECONOPHYSICS recognizes
outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a
better understanding of socio-economic problems. It was sponsored by
McKinsey & Company with an endowment of EUR 5,000. and is intended for
young scientists (f/m) not older than 35 years. 

For the award, we have received 33 nominations (from ten countries) for
qualified candidates currently working in eight different countries,
which have been evaluated by an international jury. 

The winning candidate, Dr. Damien Challet (age 28) graduated from EPFL of
Lausanne in 1997, were he also did his Ph.D thesis from 1997-2000, and is
now a postdoc at Oxford University.  With the Minority Game, he has
developed one of the cornerstone models in econophysics. It allows to
model the collective behavior of systems of heterogeneous interacting
agents in market-like situations.  Based on his model, Dr. Challet has
derived a statistical mechanics approach to market dynamics that, on the
one hand, allows to reduce the complexity of real market systems to an
analytically tractable model and, on the other hand, is able to reproduce
the stylized facts observed in real financial markets.

Both the theoretical work and the numerical simulations of Dr. Challet
have brought the dynamics of minority games to an unprecedented level
of understanding. They have further revealed relations between
fundamental mechanisms in socio-economic and physical systems and this
way have initiated a lot of new research during the past years, to the
advantage of the field of Socio- and Econophysics.

Frank Schweitzer
Chairman of AKSOE
http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/~frank/AKSOE