The HEAD Executive Committee has selected: Dr. Joey Neilsen for the 2012-2013 HEAD Dissertation Prize for his thesis: 

"Winds of Change: The Physics of Accretion, Ejection, and X-ray Variability in GRS1915+105"

Dr. Neilsen received his PhD in 2011 from the Harvard Astronomy Department under the supervision of Prof. Julia Lee. He is now an Einstein Fellow at Boston University, after having spent a year as a postdoc with the HETGS group at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. He will be giving an invited talk about his thesis at the HEAD meeting in Monterey, CA. The committee was very pleased that the dissertation prize attracted a large number of extremely strong nominations, and they thank all the nominators and nominees for alerting us to this work. The Executive Committee is looking into ways to alert the rest of the HEAD community about new dissertations in high-energy, possibly with a section on the HEAD website.