In September, seven finalists gathered in Washington to be interviewed by the APS Apker Award selection committee. The Apker Award recognizes outstanding research by an undergraduate student. The committee, chaired by 2011 APS President Barry Barish, recommended two of the finalists as the 2013 Apker Award recipients, and the recommendation was approved by the Executive Board.
The recipient from a PhD-granting institution is Guy Geyer Marcus of Wesleyan University, whose research was titled "Rotational Dynamics of Anisotropic Particles in Turbulence: Measurements of Lagrangian Vorticity and the Effects of Alignment with the Velocity Gradient." His research advisor at Wesleyan was Greg Voth, and he is now pursuing graduate studies at The Johns Hopkins University.
The recipient from an institution that does not grant a PhD in physics is Hao Shi of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Under the supervision of Mishkat Bhattacharya he did research on "Torsional Optomechanics: A Dialogue Between Spinning Photons and Twisting Oscillators." He is now doing graduate work at Cornell.