Astronomy Department Chair Avi Loeb is helping prepare the next generation of astronomers to interpret the coming flood of data from new, more powerful telescopes with a new textbook, “The First Galaxies in the Universe.”
Harvard Astronomy graduate student Bekki Dawson and CFA Hubble postdoctoral fellow Matt Walker won the Block Prize at the Aspen Center for Physics Winter Conference this year. Organizers of each winter conference choose promising young physicists to receive the Block Award. This year, two out of the seven awardees are ITC members. For more details, see http://www.aspenphys.org/physicists/winter/block.html
Photo shows Jim visiting the amateur radio club, BY1QH, in Tsinghua University in 2008.
Harvard Astronomy Professor James Moran has been awarded the 2013 Grote Reber Gold Medal for lifetime innovative contributions to radio astronomy. Recent awardees include Nicolay Kardashev from Russia and Jocelyn Bell Burnell from England.
Harvard graduate students Nicholas Stone and Rebekah Dawson were the recipients of the 2012 Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize—established through the support of his father, John Doxsey, and other friends, family, and colleagues—provides graduate students or postdocs within one year of receiving or receipt of their PhD a monetary prize to enable the oral presentation of their dissertation research at a winter meeting of the AAS.
Stone was also selected by Springer, the European publisher, to have his thesis published as an individual hardcover book. Springer selects a small number of theses in astronomy every year for this prize.
Harvard Astronomy graduate student Nathan Sanders was recently awarded Harvard's "Bowdoin Prize in the Natural Sciences" for his essay entitled "Observing the Twenty-First Century Sky and Understanding the Universe."
Avi Loeb's book has been selected for the Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award by the American Astronomical Society. The award is for Avi's first book, "How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form?", published by Princeton University Press in 2010.
Professor David Charbonneau was selected among the 100 Almuni of Influence of the University of Toronto in Canada. The Alumni of Influence were selected based their contributions to their professional field at an international, national, or local level, as well as their volunteerism within the wider community and their philanthropy. The list of distinguished alumni includes Astronomer Wendy Freedman (Carnegie) and Nobel Laureate in Physics, Walter Kohn (Santa Barbara); for more details see http://www.uc.utoronto.ca/100-alumni-influence
Citation: For his many fundamental contributions to the development of the field of molecular astrophysics, which led to a better understanding of interstellar space, including the giant molecular clouds that are the birthplaces of stars and planets.
Irwin Shapiro was awarded the 2013 Einstein Prize of The American Physical Society. The Prize was established to recognize outstanding accomplishments in the field of gravitational physics and consists of $10,000 and a certificate that includes the appropriate citation. The citation that will appear on
Irwin's certificate reads as follows:
"For his contributions to experimental solar system tests of relativistic theories of gravity, and in particular for proposing and measuring the Shapiro time delay effect."
The Einstein Prize will be presented at APS April 2013 Meeting in Denver, CO, April 13-16, 2013, at a special Ceremonial session.
Kaisey Mandel (Ph.D. 2011), now a postdoc at Imperial College London, won the Savage Award of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the outstanding doctoral dissertation in applied methodology. His dissertation was "Improving cosmological distances to illuminate dark energy: hierarchical Bayesian models for type Ia supernovae in the optical and near-infrared." Kaisey received his award and gave a plenary talk at the ISBA World Meeting in Kyoto, Japan this summer.
Avi Loeb will deliver a series of four lectures as the recipient of the 2012 Galileo Chair ("Cattedra Galileiana") at Scoula Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. The lecture titles and times (in Italy) are as follows:
Eighty-nine seniors received this year’s prestigious Hoopes Prize for outstanding research or scholarly work, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Prize Office announced Friday.
The distinction—funded by the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes ’19—comes with a $4,000 award for students and a $1,000 honorarium for faculty advisors who nominated student theses or projects this spring, according to Tarik Umar ’10, an economics concentrator and a Hoopes winner.
Four prizes were awarded to Harvard Astronomy Undergraduates:
Dierickx, Marion Inge for her submission entitled "Constraining Local Group Dark Matter Using M33's Past Orbit" - nominated by Professor Abraham Loeb
Fogarty, Kevin Welsh for his submission entitled "Galaxy Cluster Mass Proxies: Examining X-Ray and Sunyaev- Zel'dovich Effect Observations of 114 Galaxy Clusters in the Planck Early SZ Catalog" - nominated by Dr. Christine Jones
Kruse, Ethan Alexander for his submission entitled "A Systematic Search for New Kepler Circumbinary Planets" - nominated by Dr. Darin Ragozzine
Rice, Thomas Sean for his submission entitled "A Hierarchical Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Milky Way" - nominated by Professor Alyssa Goodman
Harvard Astronomy Professor and Department Chair was selected to be a 2012 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow. Founded in 1780, the Academy is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Election to membership is an uncommon honor. Other 2012 AAAS Fellows include Mel Books, Clint Eastwood, and Hillary Clinton.
