Goldberg Prizes awarded to Astronomy concentrators Larom Segev and Carl (Cal) Guia at end of year Awards Ceremony

The 2026 Goldberg Prizes awarded to Astronomy concentrators Larom Segev and Carl (Cal) Guia at end of year Awards Ceremony on May 26, 2026.

Larom Segev won the senior Goldberg Prize for developing an automatic scheduler for the Rubin Telescope as it executes the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The survey loses a significant fraction of its images to clouds and contrails. In the majority of cases, the cloud cover is a mix of moving obscuration and clear, open skies. Ms. Segev shows in her thesis, "Cloudy with a Chance of Data: A Dynamic Scheduler for All-Sky Surveys with Real-Time Optimization", how to point the telescope to clear sky when there is a mixture of cloudy and clear sky. This plausibly will add the equivalent of ~395 clear nights to the LSST's ten-year program. She was advised by Professor Stubbs.

Carl (Cal) Audric Guia won the junior Goldberg Prize for his thesis “The Fraction of Little Red Dots in Protoclusters at z<3.9,” in which he identified the enigmatic Little Red Dot objects in James Webb Space Telescope data from the JADES program, and measured their abundance in nascent galaxy clusters as a function of redshift. Carl finds that the abundance of Little Red Dots drops precipitously below redshift 4, indicating that the formation of these objects is selectively linked to high-redshift environments. Throughout the work, Carl was deeply engaged in researching the background science area he was working in, improving his analytical methodology, seeking feedback, and presenting his findings as clearly as possible. He was advised by Daniel Eisenstein and Fengwu Sun.