Chambliss Student Poster Awards for AAS 229

The latest Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards poster competition, which occurred in January during the 229th AAS meeting in Grapevine, Texas, was quite exciting and informative! There were 113 undergraduate students and 62 graduate students entered in the competition — all of whom are junior members of the Society (a requirement to be in the competition). We had nearly 200 members volunteer to judge the posters. Student posters were evaluated during the morning coffee breaks and afternoon poster sessions Wednesday through Friday during the meeting.

For many students in the competition, this was their first time presenting at an AAS meeting, as well as their first time attending an AAS meeting. And though many a student may have been nervous, as usual judges expressed that being a Chambliss judge and talking with students about their work was a very rewarding, fun, and gratifying experience. Being a judge not only allowed them to interact with students but also allowed them to focus on some science for which they might otherwise not have had time.

So, if you haven't signed up to judge student posters in the past or in a while, I encourage you to do so in the future — the more judges we have, the fewer posters each judge is responsible for judging! Your next opportunity will be at the 230th AAS meeting in Austin, Texas, 4-8 June 2017.

Here are the results from Grapevine:

• Kimberly Cartier (Pennsylvania State University)
• Zachary Hartman (Georgia State University)
• Dhanesh Krishnarao (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• V. Ashley Villar (Harvard University)
• Schuyler Wolff (Johns Hopkins University)
• Zhoujian Zhang (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa)

• Katelyn Breivik (Northwestern University)
• Samuel Factor (University of Texas at Austin)
• Tsz Kuk Daisy Leung (Cornell University)
• David Sliski (University of Pennsylvania)

• Jacqueline Antwi-Danso (Texas Christian University)
• Lauren Chambers (Yale University)
• Miles Cranmer (McGill University/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
• Victoria DiTomasso (CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College)
• Michael Foley (University of Notre Dame)
• Juliana Garcia-Mejia (Harvard College)
• Elizabeth Johnson (Villanova University)
• Rohan Naidu (Yale-NUS College)
• Rosa Wallace (University of Colorado Denver)

• Erin Flowers (Columbia University)
• Imad Pasha (University of California, Berkeley / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
• Shreyas Vissapragada (Columbia University)

Congratulations, all! On behalf of our Society and all of the students who entered the AAS 229 Chambliss competition, I would like to thank our volunteer judges, with a special thanks to those who volunteered onsite to replace judges who had last-minute schedule changes. I would also like to thank the AAS Executive Office staff who help to make this very important competition such a big success.