Prizes & Awards

Best Student Presentation Awards

An award, sponsored by the Division of Gravitational Physics, for best presentation by a student will be made at each of the following annual regional meetings:

The award is $200 and gives the recipient the right to advertise her/himself as winning the Division of Gravitational Physics Best Student Presentation at the particular meeting.

Criteria governing the award:

  • The only candidates are those who have not yet officially received PhD degrees.
  • A member of the Division shall organize the judging of presentations. Judges may include faculty members and postdoctoral associates, but are not to include students.
  • The criteria for winning shall be a continuation of the criteria previously used for the award of the Bell prize at Pacific Coast Gravity Meetings. This means, in particular, that the quality of the research and of the presentation will be weighted as the judges see fit.
  • The Division member taking responsibility for organizing the judging will notify the Secretary-Treasurer, in advance of the meeting, and will notify the Secretary-Treasurer of the outcome of the judging, including contact information for the winner. The Secretary-Treasurer will then arrange to have the prize money sent to the winner.
  • The prize can be split, but this is strongly discouraged.

Winners

Congratulations to all of our past winners:

 Year  Meeting  Speaker Speaker  Talk Title

2024

GCGM 10

Purnima Narayan (UMiss)

Impact of Strong Gravitational Lensing on GR Tests with BBH Signals

2024

PCGM 40

Elliott Gesteau (Caltech)

Renormalizing sums over topologies

2023

MRM 33

Amanda Farah (UChicago)

No need to know: Astrophysics-agnostic spectral siren cosmology

2023

EGM 23

Aviral Prakash (Penn State)

QCD Phase Transitions in Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Simulations and Detectability

2023

PCGM 39

Yangyang Cai (University of Arizona)

Principal null directions as trajectories of ultrarelativistic charged particles with radiation reaction

2022

MRM 32

Jann Zosso (ETHZ & UIUC)

Cosmological tensions guiding the path beyond ΛCDM

2022

PCGM 38

Keefe Mitman (Caltech)

The Importance of BMS Frames for Gravitational Wave Modeling

2021

MRM 31

Daine Danielson (Chicago)

Vacuum Fluctuations Protect Causality in Quantum Gravity

2021

PCGM 37

Erik Wessel (Arizona)

Gravitational Waves from Accretion Disk Instabilities

2020

MRM 30

Lindsay DeMarchi (Northwestern)

Multi Messenger Observations of TZOs

2019

EGM 22

Elizabeth Bennewitz (Bodwin College) and Dante Iozzo (Cornell)

Black-hole accretion in the presence of Dark Matter heating, and Limitations of Weyl Scalar Extraction

2019

MRM 29

Alvaro Ballon Bordo (Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo)

Thermodynamics of Lorentzian Taub-NUT spacetimes

2019

PCGM 35

Jacob Fields (BYU)

Relativistic hydrodynamics with wavelet adaptive multi-resolution.

2018

MRM28

Maya Fishbach (University of Chicago)

A standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from GW170817 without the electromagnetic counterpart

2018

EGM21

Laura Johnson (CWRU)

Partially Massless Decoupling Limit of Massive Gravity

2018

EGM21

Oliver Janssen (NYU)

The no-boundary proposal: alive and well

2018

PCGM34

Maria Okounkova (Caltech)

On choosing the start time of binary black hole ringdown

2017

MWRM27

Katelyn Breivik (Northwestern)

Revealing the Milky Way’s black hole population with Gaia

2017

EGM20

Beatrice Bonga (Penn State)

On the Conceptual Confusion in the Notion of Transverse-Traceless Modes

2017

EGM20

Rahul Kashyap (U MassDartmouth)

Type Ia Supernovae through Spiral Instability in Binary White Dwarf Mergers

2017

PCGM33

Maximiliano Isi (Caltech)

Polarizations of continuous gravitational waves in the advanced detector era

2016

MWRM26

Zoheyr Doctor (University of Chicago)

Gravitational Wave Emulation Using Gaussian Process Regression

2016

EGM19

Jim Mertens (CWRU)

Computing Observables in an Inhomogeneous Universe using Numerical Relativity

2016

PCGM32

Matt Giesler (Caltech)

Nearly extremal binary black hole simulations

2015

EGM18

Béatrice Bonga (Penn State)

The quadrupole formula with a positive cosmological constant

2015

GCGM8

Hector Okada da Silva (Ole Miss)

A post-TOV formalism for relativistic stars

2015

MRM25

Hsin-Yu Chen (University of Chicago)

Optimizing gravitational wave sources followup strategies

2014

EGM17

Philippe Landry (Guelph)

Relativistic theory of surficial Love numbers

2014

MRM24

Kartik Prabhu (University of Chicago)

Growth rate of black hole instabilities

2013

GCGM7

Laleh Sadeghian (WUSTL)

Dark matter distributions around massive black holes: A fully general relativistic approach

2013

MRM23

Ben Farr (Northwestern)

 

2012

MRM22

Justin Ellis (UWM)

 

2012

PCGM28

Benson Way (UCSB)

 Finite Size Effects in Holographic Superconductors

2011

MRM21

Stephen Green (University of Chicago)

 

2010

MRM20

Benjamin Lackey (UWM)

 

2009

MRM19

Sam Gralla (University of Chicago)

Electromagnetic Analog of Binary Black Hole Bobbing and Kicks

2008

GCGM4

Ian Vega (University of Florida)

Field regularization for self-force problems

2008

MRM18

Sam Gralla (University of Chicago)

 

2007

MRM17

Jocelyn Read (UWM)

 

2007

GCGM3

Enrique Pazos (LSU)

The effects of the background geometry on the extracted waveforms

2006

MRM16

Nicolas Yunes (Penn State)

How to Kick a Hole and Other Eccentric Stories

2005

MRM15

Branson Stephens

 

2005

EGM8

Chad Middleton (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Constrained Perturbative Expansion of the DGP Model

2005

PCGM21

Joey Shapiro-Key (Montana State University)

Extending the WMAP Bound on the Size of the Universe

2004

PCGM20

Henriette Elvang (UCSB)

Black Rings: Non-uniqueness of Black Holes in Supergravity

2004

PCGM20

Louis Rubbo (Montana State University)

Identification and Subtraction of Bright Galactic Binaries from LISA Data

2004

MRM14

Ishai Ben-Dov (University of Chicago)

 

2003

MRM13

William Komp (UWM)

 

2003

PCGM19

Henriette Elvang (UCSB)

Bubbles and Black Holes

2002

MRM12

Matthew Duez (UIUC)

 

2000

PCGM16

Veronika Hubeny (UCSB)

Quasinormal modes of Schwarzschild-AdS black holes and their relevance for gauge theories

1999

PCGM15

Teviet Creighton (Caltech)

Atmospheric gravity gradients: a low-frequency noise limit for LIGO

1997

PCGM13

Teviet Creighton (Caltech)

Search techniques for periodic gravitational waves

1994

PCGM10

Rhett Herman (Montana State University)

Charged pair production in the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole interior


If you know of a winner not listed here or have any other updates, please email the division secretary.