Celebrating our community: awards and honours

In this section we celebrate success and recognise colleagues, partners and members of the community who have received prestigious grants, awards and honours in recent months.

SKAO Council Chair Dr Catherine Cesarsky has been awarded the Centennial Medal by the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, her alma mater. The medal recognises alumni whose contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, to their colleagues, and to society have made a fundamental and lasting impact. The citation reads: “Catherine Cesarsky’s trailblazing achievements in astronomy are matched only by her leadership in some of the highest-ranking scientific positions in Europe.”

Prof. Anton Zensus, director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) and head of its Radio Astronomy/Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) department, has received the European Astronomical Society’s prestigious Tycho Brahe Medal for major advances of VLBI that led to the first images of the shadows of the black holes in the galaxy Messier 87 and in our own galactic centre.

Prof. Anton Zensus

Prof. Matthew Bailes, Prof. Duncan Lorimer and Prof. Maura McLaughlin, members of the SKAO’s Pulsar Science Working Group, have been jointly awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for the discovery of fast radio bursts, detailed in a seminal research paper published in 2007.

Prof. Matthew Bailes, Prof. Duncan Lorimer and Prof. Maura McLaughlin

Prof. Jason Hessels, co-chair of the SKAO’s Transients Science Working Group, has been awarded a €3.5 million ERC Advanced Grant to search for the origin of fast radio bursts. Prof. Hessels, based at the University of Amsterdam and Chief Astronomer at ASTRON, will use the award to develop new hardware to set up a coordinated network of European radio telescopes to study repeating FRBs in more detail, and to set up a research team.

Prof. Jason Hessels

Nicholas Pritchard

Software engineer and data scientist Nicholas Pritchard, part of the computing team working on SKA software at ICRAR/University of Western Australia, has been awarded a Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship to undertake a PhD in data-intensive astronomy, to progress the use of artificial intelligence in radio astronomy. The scholarships include a nine month bespoke leadership development programme and international experiences such as overseas study or placements.

Dr Rafael Bachiller

Dr Rafael Bachiller, director of the Spanish National Astronomical Observatory and member of the Spanish delegation at the SKAO Council, is one of the winners of the 2023 CSIC-Fundación BBVA prize for scientific communication for his sustained dedication to the dissemination of knowledge.

Angela Teale

SKA-Low Head of Engineering Operations Angela Teale made the final of Engineer of the Year at the Australian Space Awards, which recognise the leading individuals and businesses driving the development of Australia’s space economy.