Eric Keto Prize

The Eric R. Keto Prize for Graduate Students in Theoretical Astrophysics, endowed with a generous donation by ITC Senior Member Eric Keto, is awarded each year for the best thesis in theoretical astrophysics by a student at the CfA, as selected by the Senior Members of the ITC. The restriction is that the nominated student needs to receive their PhD in the year of the award on a topic in theoretical astrophysics. The student can be from any department within Harvard as long as their advisor is a senior member at the ITC.

  • Hyerin Cho won for the thesis "Black Hole Accretion and Feedback: From the Event Horizon to Galactic Scales" (Advisor: Ramesh Narayan) - 2926
  • Jiwon (Jesse) Han won for the thesis "The Galactic Halo in Stars and Shadows" (Advisor: Charlie Conroy) - 2025
  • Magda Siwek won for “Signatures of Circumbinary Disk Dynamics in Massive Black Hole Binary Populations” (Advisor: Lars Hernquist) and Andrew Andrew Saydjari won for “Statistical Models of the Spatial, Kinematic, and Chemical Complexity of Dust" (Advisor: Dopug Finkbeiner) - 2024
  • Floor Broekgaarden won for her thesis “Gravitational-Wave Paleontology: A New Frontier to Probe Massive Binary Stars Across Cosmic History” Advisor: Edo Berger) - 2023
  • Boryana Tsvetanova Hadzhiyska for her thesis “Forward modeling in the era of cosmological surveys" (Advisor: Daniel Eisenstein) -2022
  • Ellen Price for her thesis "Simulating Protoplanetary Disk Dynamics and Investigating their Exoplanet Outcomes" (Advisor: Karin Öberg) - 2021
  • Josh Speagle for his thesis "Mapping the Milky Way in the Age of Gaia" (Advisors: Charlie Conroy and Doug Finkbeiner) - 2020
  • Andrew Chael for his thesis "Simulating and Imaging Supermassive Black Hole Accretion Flows" (Advisor: Ramesh Narayan) - 2019
  • Pierre Christian for his thesis "Detecting gravitational lensing of gravitational waves" (Advisor: Avi Loeb) - 2018
  • Philip Mocz for his thesis “Moving Mesh Magnetohydrodynamics: Magnetic Processes in Star Formation and Cosmology.” (Advisor: Lars Hernquist) - 2017
  • Gongjie Li for her thesis " Long-term Dynamics of High Mass Ratio Multiple"s - 2015