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
Frank Schweitzer 2002-09-09