News: Awards

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

The American Astronomical Society has awarded the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy to Maya Fishbach for her “major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe.” Fishbach is known for performing the first “dark standard siren” measurement of the Hubble constant with gravitational waves and a galaxy catalog (Fishbach et al. 2019); discovering a gravitational-wave signature of pair-instability supernovae (Fishbach & Holz 2017); proposing the use of black hole spins to distinguish whether black holes grow from previous mergers (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 20177a); and measuring the redshift evolution of the black hole merger rate for the first time (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 2018).
 
The Annie Jump Cannon Award is given every year for outstanding research and promise for future research to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her PhD.

On January 3, 2025, the Biden White House presented 23 individuals and 2 organizations with the National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation.

The APS Fellowship Program was created to recognize members who may have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. They may also have made significant contributions to the teaching of physics or service and participation in the activities of the Society.

CCAPP is proud to announce Abigail Lee (U. Chicago) and Hanjue Zhu (U. Chicago) as the winners of the 2024 Price Prize in Cosmology and Astrophysics

Prof. Freedman is a Canadian-American cosmologist at the University of Chicago who works in the area of refining measurement of the Hubble Constant. She is renowned for her work on Cepheid variable stars through a Hubble Space Telescope Key Project. Her work and accomplishments are closely connected to the big-bang theory of Georges Lemaître.

John Carlstrom, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, receives this prize in recognition of his critical contributions to the Physical Sciences Division and the continued success of both academic departments.

Ava Polzin, Astronomy and Astrophysics “The Smallest Pieces of the Puzzle: Using Dwarf Galaxies to Understand the Universe”

Gabriel Hoshino, PhD student, was awarded the DOE’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Fellowship to work with Prof. David Miller, Andrew Sonnenschein, and  Stefan Knirck on "Instrumentation for a Terahertz Reflector-Based Search for Axions and Dark Photon”  
 

Congratulations to the 2023 Blue Apple Prize winner, Amanda Farah!

University of Chicago astrophysicist celebrated for work investigating the cosmic microwave background for clues about the early universe.

Citation: "For the development of techniques expanding the low-energy reach of new particle detector technologies, with applications in neutrino physics, dark matter searches, and the study of charged-lepton flavor violating modes of muon decay."
 

Instruments would help us understand beginning, history, makeup of the universe

In an interview with APS News, Kolb discusses the Big Bang, parallel universes, and the need for public outreach.

Congratulations to graduate student Karia Dibert, who has been awarded a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year.