17 November 2015
Bill Borucki Receives 2016 Franklin Institute Award
Richard Fienberg Running Hare Observatory
Last week the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, announced its 2016 slate of awardees, and among them was William J. Borucki, recently retired from NASA's Ames Research Center and best known as principal investigator on the Kepler mission.
Specifically, Bill is being presented with the 2016 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, "For his vision and perseverance in developing techniques for measuring the brightness of stars to unprecedented accuracy, and for providing the scientific leadership for NASA's Kepler space mission, which discovered thousands of planetary systems and demonstrated that Earth-sized exoplanets are as common as stars."
This adds to an impressive list of accolades, including the AAS's 2011 Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy, the 2015 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and many other prestigious awards.
See the Franklin Institute's website for more information about their medals and prizes and instructions for nominating worthy scientists for future recognition.