Awards and News Features

Selected Awards, Fellowships, and Honors

• 🏆 Co-recipient of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN.
• 🎓 Elected a full member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society in 2025.
• 🏅 Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy Award (2024) – University of Wisconsin-Madison, for excellence in public outreach of scientific research.
• 🥇 2023 Postdoc Excellence Award – Postdoctoral Association, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• 🎓 APS Career Mentoring Fellow (2022) – Selected by the American Physical Society.
• 🥈 Finalist, Department of Particles & Fields Grand Slam Competition 2020 – American Physical Society.
• 🏅 APS Travel Award (2018) – Awarded by DPF, American Physical Society, for APS April Meeting 2018, Columbus, Ohio.
• 🎓 ANL-ATLAS Graduate Fellowship (2017) – Argonne National Laboratory, USA, for one-year hardware fellowship (2018).
• 🎓 Summer Research Fellowship (2017) – High Energy Physics Center for Computational Excellence (HEPCCE), Argonne National Lab.
• 🏅 Graduate Travel Award (2017) – Physics Department, OSU, to visit SLAC Laboratory at Stanford.
• 🏅 APS Travel Award (2017) – Awarded by DPF, American Physical Society for APS April Meeting 2017, Washington DC.
• 🎓 Summer Internship at CERN (2015) – Interned in the ALICE Experiment and Accelerator Physics group.
• 🎓 Sir Syed Global Scholar Award (2014) – Sir Syed Education Society of North America.
• 🎓 INSPIRE-SHE Scholarship (2010–2015) – Awarded by the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Govt. of India for top 1% rank in Higher Secondary.
• 🎓 University Post Graduate Merit Scholarship (2013–2015) – Department of Physics, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), India.
• 🥇 1st Position in M.Sc. (Physics) 1st Semester Exam (2014) – AMU, India (Ranked 1st among 50 students).
• 🥇 Best Student of the Year Award (2008) – Non-Residential Category, Sargachi Ramakrishna Mission High School, West Bengal, India.

Selected News Articles and Features

• 📰 “UW–Madison scientists part of team awarded Breakthrough Prize in Physics”
  University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 15, 2025
  Link

• 📰 [News in Bangla language in India] “আন্তর্জাতিক ‘ব্রেকথ্রু প্রাইজ’ প্রাপকদের তালিকায় বিজ্ঞানী ড.ওয়াসিকুল ইসলাম Puber Kalom (Daily Newspaper, Kolkata, India), May 6, 2025
  Link

• 📰 “Wasikul Islam wins 2024 WISL award for communicating science”
  University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 21, 2024
  Link

• 🧠 “AI Breakthrough in Detecting New Particles at the Large Hadron Collider”
  SciTechDaily, July 4, 2024
  Link

• 🧠 “Machine learning could help reveal undiscovered particles within data from the LHC”
  Phys.org, April 2024
  Link
  (Also featured on Newswise.com)

• 🌐 “ATLAS searches for new phenomena using unsupervised machine learning for anomaly detection”
  ATLAS CERN Physics Briefing, August 24, 2023
  Link

• 📰 “Wasikul Islam honored with UW Postdoc Association Excellence in Service Award”
  University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 26, 2023
  Link

• 📰 “OSU doctoral student wins research fellowship at Argonne National Lab”
  Oklahoma State University News, December 20, 2017
  Link

• 🌍 “Wasikul Islam, NMSSS featured alumni”
  CERN & Society Foundation – February 2023
  Link

• 📰 “AMU center holds meet on higher education abroad”
  Hindustan Times, January 15, 2023
  Link