Ashfia Huq

Mary Lyon Award

February 11, 2008

The Alumnae Association is pleased to honor Ashfia Huq, class of 1996, with the Mary Lyon Award.  This award honors a young alumna who graduated no more than fifteen years ago and who has demonstrated sustained achievement in her life and career consistent with the humane values that Mary Lyon exemplified in her life and inspired in others.

Ashfia, after earning your B.A. from Mount Holyoke in computer science and physics, you entered a doctoral program at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, completing your Ph.D. in physics in 2003.  During your postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, you worked at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source, where you developed a unique expertise in neutron diffraction methods that distinguished you from many other young scientists.  You also published numerous papers in major scientific journals, including Science, Chemical Physics Letters, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry, among others.  Your 2002 paper, published with a co-author in Science, has been cited thirty times in the literature.  Your outstanding qualifications as researcher led to you being hired as a scientist at the prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. There, you have been assigned to work with a new neutron powder diffractometer, POWGEN, at the newly constructed Spallation Neutron Source—known as the most powerful neutron source in the world. 

Your work has earned you not only the respect of distinguished colleagues, but also their admiration.  Dr. Bryan Chakoumakos, leader of the Single-Crystal Diffraction Group in the Neutron Scattering Science Division at Oak Ridge, anticipates your success in “working actively with hundreds of researchers annually to conduct basic and applied research on the structure and function of technologically and fundamentally important material,” and strongly believes that you will be “a major contributor to the success of POWGEN and the Spallation Neutron Source.” 

In recognition of your extraordinary professional achievements early in your career, and of the remarkable promise your future holds as scientist, the Alumnae Association presents you with the Mary Lyon Award.

Mary Graham Davis ’65
President                      

Rochelle Calhoun ’83
Executive Director Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College