Ashtekar Prizes

In addition to the Ashtekar Award, ISQLG established two Ashtekar Prizes to recognize the best presentations at the Loops conferences by students and early-career postdoctoral researchers.

During the Loops '26 conference in Hangzhou, the Ashtekar Prizes were presented to Dr. Seth K. Asante and Mr. Chaosong Chen.

Seth K. Asante

Dr. Seth K. 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.

Dr. Asante is an African theoretical physicist from Ghana. He completed his PhD in 2022 from the University of Waterloo, as part of his doctoral work based at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Waterloo ON, Canada), 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.

Chaosong Chen

Mr. Chaosong 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. Mr.  Chen is a PhD student at the Pennsylvania State University (State College PA, USA).

—Wolfgang Wieland on behalf of the Website Working Group reporting.