Phiala Shanahan: rapid rise from Adelaide University studies to physics professor at prestigious MIT Boston

Phiala Shanahan, another graduate guided by revered Adelaide University professor Anthony Thomas, was the youngest professor of physics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston in 2017.
Image courtesy Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Phiala Shanahan joined the world’s leading experts in theoretical nuclear and particle physics soon after completing studies in Adelaide University in 2016 with a Bragg Gold Medal from the Australian Institute of Physics “for the most outstanding PhD thesis under the auspices of an Australian university”.

Among multiple honours that followed, Shanahan was listed in the United States of America’s Forbes Magazine 30 under 30 in science in 2017. That year, at 27, she was appointed the youngest professor of physics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

Shanahan grew up in the Adelaide suburb of Walkerville, showing strong curiosity and leadership. Her extroverted nature was changed, at nine, by the death of her father Terry from cancer. It also motivated her, assuring her mother Beate that she would get a scholarship to Wilderness School to cover any fees. She also trained as a justice of the peace to sign documents for people nearing death and played saxophone in a group with gigs to support a charity that Shanahan operated for a group of women in Africa.

Shanahan was in turn supported by teachers and close friends at Wilderness School, tight bonds with her mother, and the nurturing environment at Adelaide University, particularly being mentored by revered professor Tony Thomas, during her bachelor of science degree, that opened her to the possibilities of a career in science and physics. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics faculty, Shanahan joined another of Thomas’s Adelaide University protegees, professor William Detmold, also exploring the subatomic world at MIT's centre for theoretical physics.

Before joining the MIT physics faculty in 2018, Shanahan was a postdoctoral associate there from 2015-17, and she was both assistant professor at the College of William & Mary and senior staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson national accelerator facility 2017-18. Among Shanahan’s honours have been the American Physical Society 2017 dissertation award in hadronic physics "for outstanding achievements in elucidating the role of strangeness and charge symmetry breaking in nucleon structure using lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and effective field theory techniques."

She received the 2020 Kenneth G. Wilson Award for excellence in lattice field theory "for excellence in the study of hadrons and nuclei in lattice QCD and for pioneering the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to lattice field theory and the 2021 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award "for key insights into the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei using numerical and analytical methods and pioneering the use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations in particle and nuclear physics."

Shanahan continued to work on understanding the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei from the fundamental (quark and gluon) degrees of freedom encoded in the Standard Model of particle physics. She focused on the role of gluons, the force carriers of the strong interactions described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in hadron and nuclear structure.

Using analytic tools and high-performance supercomputing, Shanahan was the first to calculate the gluon structure of light nuclei. She has also extensively studied the role of strange quarks in the proton and light nuclei which sharpen theory predictions for dark matter cross-sections in direct detection experiments. To overcome computational limits in QCD calculations for hadrons and in particular for nuclei, Shanahan pursued a programme to integrate modern machine learning into computational nuclear physics studies.

• Information included from Matt Deighton profile in SA Weekend, The Advertiser, Adelaide