Dr Bisset, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, gained the award for a paper involving rotons - quantums of vortex motion - which was published in Physical Review Letters last year.
The paper's second author was Otago University physicist Blair Blakie, a former doctoral supervisor of Dr Bisset.
The award is for the best scientific paper by a student registered for the degree of PhD in physical sciences, earth sciences and mathematical and information sciences at a New Zealand university.
Dr Bisset said the award was ''a big thing for me'' and would ''definitely help'' in his longer term efforts to gain future academic work.
The award was accompanied by a $1000 prize.
Born in the North Island, Dr Bisset later attended Waimate High School before beginning his Otago University studies.
Award officials said the paper had presented a ''new theory for the behaviour of condensates in which exotic roton excitations develop''.
These excitations were first predicted to occur more than 10 years ago, but had yet to be experimentally observed.
After rapid developments made in experiments in the past two years, a ''vigorous race has developed to find these excitations''.
Dr Bisset's work had discovered a striking feature of the rotons that had been welcomed in the research field as a ''smoking gun for proving their existence'', officials said.
Dr Bisset is the fourth doctoral graduate of the Otago University physics department to win the award, the first being Craig Rodger, who won the inaugural award in 1997 and is now a professor in the Otago department.
