Ashtekar Prizes for Best Presentations

Seth K. Asante

Dr. Seth K. Asante is an African theoretical physicist from Ghana. Dr. Asante received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Waterloo (Canada), as part of his doctoral work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, followed by a research fellowship at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. From 2022 to 2024, he held a postdoctoral position at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany), before returning to Canada, where he is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the gravity group of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB.

During the Loops '26 conference in Hangzhou (China), Dr. Asante received the 2026 Ashtekar Prize for the quality of his research and for his presentation on “A New Framework for q-Deformed Amplitudes via Deferred Cyclotomic Representations,” which he presented during the parallel session on black holes and cosmology.

Chaosong Chen

Mr. Chaosong Chen is a PhD student from the Pennsylvania State University (State College, PA, U.S.A). During the Loops '26 conference in Hangzhou (China), Mr. Chen received the 2026 Ashtekar Prize for his presentation and the quality of his research on Toller matrices and causality in spinfoams, a joint project carried out in collaboration with Dr. Eugenio Bianchi and Dr. Maurico Gamonal.