AAS hands out eight awards; seven win division prizes

Six professors, a researcher, and a staff astronomer are receiving awards from the American Astronomical Society.

AAS and the American Institute of Physics are jointly awarding the 2006 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics to Marc Davis, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley, “for his pioneering work on the large-scale structure in the Universe.” The committee choosing the prizewinner recognizes Davis for “his innovative and influential contributions to observations, simulations and instrumentation, and his outstanding mentoring of students, as examples of outstanding work in the field of astrophysics.”

J. Roger Angel, director of the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, director of the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics, Regents Professor of Astronomy, and Regents Professor of Optical Sciences, all at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the recipient of the Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation for 2006. He was selected “for his superlative work spanning two decades on the development of a new generation of large telescopes, his establishment of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab and a host of extraordinary conceptual ideas that have been turned into practical engineering solutions for astronomy,” according to the award citation.

The 2006 Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize goes to John E. Carlstrom, professor in the departments of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics and a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute, all at the University of Chicago, and director of the university’s Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. He is cited “for his innovative work on the use of interferometry to study the early Universe through cosmic-microwave background radiation fluctuations and polarimetry and the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect. He has produced results that strongly constrain cosmological models of the amount and nature of dark matter and energy and the influence of cosmic inflation.”

Bryan M. Gaensler, head of the gallium sulfide research group in the high-energy astrophysics division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a professor in the astronomy department at Harvard University, is the winner of the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy for 2006. He was selected “for his work on the interactions between neutron stars and their surroundings, which led to our appreciation of the wide diversity of magnetized neutron stars.”

The Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy for 2006 is being handed out to Lisa J. Kewley, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, “for her powerful work on theoretical modeling and analysis of galaxy spectra. She developed and maintains the online MAPPINGS code to model galaxy spectra, and she devised new techniques for simultaneously deriving star formation history, metallicity and reddening. She leads the way in measuring the star formation and chemical enrichment history of the Universe.”

Bohdan Paczynski, Lyman Spitzer Jr Professor of Astrophysics at the Princeton University Observatory, has won the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship for 2006 “for his highly original contributions to a wide variety of fields including advanced stellar evolution, the nature of gamma-ray bursts, accretion in binary systems, gravitational lensing, and cosmology. His research has been distinguished by its creativity and breadth, as well as the stimulus it has provided to highly productive observational investigations.”

The 2006 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy goes to Re’em Sari, associate professor of astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech, “for his diverse contributions to the theoretical understanding of relativistic explosions, gamma-ray bursts and the dynamics of solar system bodies.”

Sidney Wolff, staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, is the recipient of the AAS Education Prize for 2006 “for her extraordinary commitment to science education throughout her career, beginning with authoring an introductory textbook, and culminating in the first professional, refereed, astronomy education journal,” the Astronomy Education Review. The citation also praised her championing of astronomy education and her leadership of the NOAO, AAS, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Three scientists share this year’s Bruno Rossi Prize—the top award given annually by AAS’s high-energy astrophysics division—for their work on developing an understanding of the exotic environment around fast-spinning neutron stars. The recipients are Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Deepto Chakrabarty, an associate professor of physics at MIT and a researcher at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research; and Rudy Wijnands, a member of the University of Amsterdam’s high-energy astrophysics group. They were awarded the prize “for their pioneering research which revealed millisecond spin periods and established the powerful diagnostic tool of kilohertz intensity oscillations in accreting neutron star binary systems.”

The solar physics division of AAS is awarding the 2006 Karen Harvey Prize for accomplishment by a young scientist to Steven Cranmer, an astrophysicist in the solar, stellar, and planetary sciences division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is receiving the prize “for his major theoretical and observational contributions toward understanding the roles of waves and turbulence in heating and accelerating the solar wind.”

James G. Williams of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is receiving the 2006 Brouwer Award from AAS’s division on dynamical astronomy “for his many outstanding contributions to celestial mechanics.”

The historical astronomy division of AAS awards its LeRoy E. Doggett Prize for Historical Astronomy to Steven J. Dick, chief historian at NASA in Washington, DC. He receives the award “for his distinguished career and publication record,” which has significantly increased understanding of the history of astronomy.

Spiro K. Antiochos receives the 2005 George Ellery Hale Prize from AAS’s solar physics division “for his work on the thermodynamics and stability of coronal magnetic fields and for his outstanding public service to the solar research community.” Antiochos is an astrophysicist at the E. O. Hulburt Center for Space Research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.