A $500 annual cash prize is awarded to a graduate student for the best first-author publication from the preceding year in any area of astronomy. Nominations will be solicited from faculty by the graduate student council each year.

Recipients

2025 - Wynne Turner for "New Measurements of the Lyα Forest Continuum and Effective Optical Depth with LyCAN and DESI Y1 Data"

2024 - Sebastian Lopez for "X-Ray Properties of NGC 253's Starburst-driven Outflow"

2023 - Anusha Pai Asnodkar for "Variable and Supersonic Winds in the Atmosphere of an Ultrahot Giant Planet" 

2022 - James Johnson for "Stellar migration and chemical enrichment in the milky way disc: a hybrid model"

2021 - Rachel Patton for "Towards a realistic explosion landscape for binary population synthesis"

2020 - Tharindu Jayasinghe for "The ASAS-SN catalogue of variable stars - II. Uniform classification of 412 000 known variables."

2019 - Jiayi Sun for "Cloud-scale Molecular Gas Properties in 15 Nearby Galaxies."

2018 - Stacy Kim for "In the wake of dark giants: new signatures of dark matter self-interactions in equal-mass mergers of galaxy clusters."