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HEAD Dissertation Prize Winners

 2022 Kishalay De

The 2022 Dissertation Prize has been awarded to Kishalay De for his thesis entitled "The Whisper and the Bang: Cosmic Fireworks in the Lives of Compact Binaries", conducted at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Mansi M. Kasliwal. His thesis opened a new field of exploration in the dynamic infrared sky.  Please see the HEAD Press Release for more information.

 2021 Renee Ludlam

The 2021 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Renee Ludlam for her dissertation entitled "A Hard Look at Accretion Around Neutron Stars". Her work showed how accretion disk reflection can be used to place limits on neutron star radii (and therefore the equation of state). This thesis was awarded at the University of Michigan (Advisor: Jon Miller).  Please see the HEAD press release for more information.

 2019 Jennifer Barnes

The 2019 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Jennifer Barnes of Columbia University for her dissertation entitled"Radiation Transport Modeling of Kilonovae and Broad-Lined Ic Supernovae". It established the radiative signatures of mergers between two neutron stars or a neutron star and black hole, as well as the radiative signatures of jet-driven supernovae produced by collapsing massive stars.

 2017 Eric Coughlin

The 2017 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Dr. Eric Coughlin for his thesis entitled "The Evolutionary Pathwaysof Tidal Disruption Events: From Stars to Debris Streams, Accretion Disks, and Relativistic Jets". Please see the press release.

2016 Ashley L. King

The 2016 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Ashley L. King for her thesis entitled "Outflows from Accreting Black Holes Across the Mass Scale."

2014 Reinout J. Van Weeren

The 2014 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Reinout J. Van Weeren for his thesis entitled "Radio emission from merging galaxy clusters: characterizing shocks, magnetic fields and particle acceleration."

2012 Joey Neilson

Joey Neilsen (BU) accepted the 2013 Dissertation Prize from HEAD Chair Joel Bregman at the Monterey HEAD meeting. Joey's talk on "Winds of Change: The Physics of Accretion, Ejection, and X-ray Variability in GRS1915+105" covered the many strange behaviors of this black hole binary system and speculated about what we could learn about other such systems in the future.

2011 Jeanette Gladstone

The 2011 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Jeanette Gladstone for her thesis entitled “Optical & X-ray Studies of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources,” work that was done while she was at the Durham University in the United Kingdom.

2010 Brian Metzger

The 2010 HEAD Dissertation Prize was awarded to Brian Metzger for his thesis on "Theoretical Models of Gamma-ray Burst Central Engines."