Mustafa(Pbuh) Prize laureate donates award for Bangladesh’s scientific development
A 2021 Mustafa(Pbuh) Prize laureate donates his award for the development of science and technology in his home country, Bangladesh.
MSTF Media reports:
Zahid Hasan, Bangladeshi Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a 2021 Mustafa
Prize laureate, has recently announced his decision to donate his cash award.
“I have decided to donate a significant part of my share of the prize money to seed an endowment or trust fund with the broader goal of advancing or encouraging (via outreach) science, engineering, and technology to primarily support Bangladesh and later other developing countries,” he said.
Regarding Hasan’s decision to donate his award, his wife Sarah Ahmed noted: “Professor Vafa is doing similar things for the scientific advancement of Iran with his share of the award.”
“The ripple effect these activities will generate will benefit not just one individual but many for the betterment of humanity,” she continued.
“Beyond the immediate engagements, the Mustafa
award is reaping dividends in many other ways,” Ahmed added.
Hasan was awarded the Mustafa
Prize for his work “Weyl fermion semimetals”.
He has enormously contributed to the field of topological physics. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), “his experiments have been seminal in giving rise to the field of Topological Quantum Matter with more than 50,000 citations, which is now growing vigorously at the nexus of condensed matter physics, materials engineering, nanoscience, device physics, chemistry, and relativistic quantum field theory.”
Hasan has also made essential contributions in topological phase transitions, topological magnets, topological superconductors, and Kagome materials.
Physicists hope that topological materials could eventually find applications in faster, more efficient computer chips or fanciful quantum computers. But the real reward of topological physics is a deeper understanding of the nature of matter itself.
“I have long thought of ways to use topological materials to make analogs of black holes or wormholes in the lab but did not get a chance to dedicate to these ideas,” Hasan says.
According to Hasan, “Emergent phenomena in topological physics are probably all around us, even in a piece of rock.”
