Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

2022: Patrick Kamieneski

The NRAO and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are pleased to announce that Dr. Patrick Kamieneski, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University, is the winner of the 2022 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. In his University of Massachusetts, thesis, Dr. Kamieneski developed an innovative use of gravitational lensing to interpret his ALMA and JVLA observations of high redshift galaxies to study the extreme rate of star formation in the distant Universe.  He received his Award at a ceremony on March 23 at the NRAO Headquarters in Charlottesville, VA.

2021: Ci Xue

The NRAO and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are pleased to announce that Dr. Ci Xue is the winner of the 2021 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Dr. Xue's University of Virginia Dissertation, "Discovery and Morphology of Complex Molecules toward Interstellar Molecular Clouds," used observations performed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Large Array to explore diverse star-forming dense clouds in the Milky Way. Dr. Xue developed and applied cutting-edge analysis techniques to uncover weak molecular signals from complex spectral line data. Her remarkable research expands our understanding of the initial chemical conditions of star formation and the voyage of complex organic chemicals as building blocks of bio-macromolecules. The results of Dr. Xue's thesis will guide future projects in astrochemistry for new and powerful instruments to come. Dr. Xue is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is expanding her dissertation work to study aromatic chemistry in the interstellar medium. The Award presentation and lecture by Dr. Xue took place in Charlottesville on 28 April 2022.

2020: Jane Huang

The NRAO and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are pleased to announce that Dr. Jane Huang is the winner of the 2019 NRAO/AUI Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, for her Harvard Dissertation, “Rings and Spirals in Protoplanetary Disks: The ALMA View of Planet Formation”.  Her work exploited ALMA’s unprecedented detail and sensitivity to trace how planets form from the smallest structures within dense dusty disks around very young stars.  Dr. Huang and her collaborators showed that the remarkable radial gas and dust sub-structures within the disks are keys to understanding the formation and chemical composition of young planets.  The outcomes of Dr. Huang’s thesis and her team will help to constrain theoretical models of planet formation and to serve also as a scientific pathfinder as new infrared and optical instruments become operational in the 2020s. Advisers: Sean Andrews & Karin Öberg, Harvard University.

2019: Jennifer Bergner

The NRAO and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) are pleased to announce that Dr. Jennifer Beth Bergner is the winner of the 2019 NRAO/AUI Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, for her Harvard Dissertation, Tracing Organic Complexity During Star and Planet Formation.  Dr. Bergner’s research impressively delineates how the properties of complex organic molecules can serve as a guide to the poorly understood chemical history of planetary systems and low-mass stars. Her innovative laboratory experiments have opened an exciting new path for understanding the complicated organic chemistry during the delivery of prebiotic material to future planets via a protoplanetary disk. The Award Committee was extremely impressed by Dr. Bergner’s thoughtful application of her laboratory results for interpreting spectral observations of low-mass stars obtained at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

2018: Erin Cox

The 2018 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award has been awarded to Dr. Erin Cox for her dissertation entitled Probing Planetary Disks: from Birth to Protoplanets. Her thesis was selected for its clear objectives and thoughtful observational approach. Her insights and conclusions make original and significant contributions to our understanding of the early protostellar-cloud collapse process from which the planets are forming. The extensive set of new observations and her interpretation provide realistic glimpses into the density and magnetic structures, kinematics, and available energy budgets on resolution scales of a few tens of AU that will guide future magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the conditions under which planets of various masses and orbital radii are likely to form in nascent protostellar cloud complexes. The award was presented during a ceremony at NRAO Headquarters 21 March 2019. 

Erin received her Ph.D. in 2018 in Astronomy from the University of Illinois and her B.S. in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Arizona in 2012. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Northwestern University Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics where she is continuing her studies on star and planet formation focusing on how magnetic fields influence the earliest stages of protostellar collapse and how this affects disk formation. 

2017: Claire Murray

The 2017 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award has been given to Dr. Claire Murray (Space Telescope Science Institute) for her extraordinarily detailed observations of the thermodynamic state of neutral gas in the interstellar medium (ISM), which she describes in her dissertation, "Unveiling the Diffuse, Neutral Interstellar Medium: Absorption Spectroscopy of Galactic Hydrogen." Murray’s observations along 57 different sight-lines, her painstaking data analyses, and especially the new scientific results derived from her analyses were remarkable. Her work using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, complemented by the Arecibo radio/radar telescope, has provided important new insights into the present state of the ISM and revitalized a major field of study in galactic structure. Additionally, Murray’s work establishes a solid factual foundation for probing the complex dynamics of the ISM.

Claire Murray received her M.S. (2013) and Ph.D. (2017) in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin; she graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a BA in physics in 2011. In 2010 Claire was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) student at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, where she and Lorant Sjouwerman discovered the first methanol maser in M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where she is expanding her dissertation work to study the interplay between neutral gas and dust in the Milky Way and the nearby Magellanic System to aid cosmological experiments by quantifying galactic dust foregrounds with high precision and to resolve the multidimensional gas flows governing the evolution of star-forming molecular clouds. 

2016: Jennifer Weston

The 2016 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award has been awarded to Dr. Jennifer Weston for her thesis on Radio Observations as a Tool to Investigate Shocks and Asymmetries in Accreting White Dwarf Binaries. Her research was based on long-term multi-frequency Very Large Array observations of novae and symbiotic stars, i.e., mass-transfer binary systems containing a white dwarf. Dr. Weston was able to show, among other things, that some classical novae emit synchrotron emission shortly after outburst, and she explored the degree to which symbiotics are powered by shell burning or mass accretion on the white dwarf. 

Jennifer is currently an NRAO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Green Bank Observatory. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 from Columbia University, and her B.S., Summa Cum Laude, from Brandeis University in 2008. 

The award was presented on 13 April 2017 at NRAO Headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia after which Jennifer delivered a colloquium based on her thesis research.

2015: Adele Plunket

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) have awarded the 2015 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award to Dr. Adele Plunkett, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile. 

Plunkett is recognized for her study of “molecular clouds in interstellar space that serve as the incubators of clusters of new stars.” Her work demonstrates that the gas flowing out of star-forming regions impacts nearby stellar siblings, supporting our understanding that stars form in families. 

For her dissertation research, Plunkett used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).