17 January 2018

Chambliss Student Poster Awards for AAS 231

The latest Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards poster competition occurred 9-11 January during the 231st AAS meeting near Washington, DC. A hundred undergraduates and 70 graduate students completed their entries into the competition — all of them junior (or very newly associate or full) members of the Society (a requirement to participate). Nearly 250 member-volunteers were on hand for the judging, to whom we give our greatest thanks!

As usual, student posters were evaluated during the morning and afternoon poster sessions of the first three science days of the meeting. For the first time iPosters were also eligible to be judged in addition to printed ones. We hope that our judges and students enjoyed our new reminder emails and announcements before and during the meeting. As always, please let us know how to improve the process; contact [email protected] and/or AAS Press Officer Rick Fienberg.

For many students in the competition, this was their first time presenting at an AAS meeting as well as their first time attending one. According to our judges, though, some first-timers' posters were among the best at the meeting! As usual, many judges expressed that being a Chambliss judge and talking with students about their work was rewarding, fun, and gratifying. The experience not only allowed them to interact with students but also to focus on some science they might not have otherwise encountered. Students enjoy knowing that at least someone will come and talk to them about their poster, and because they don't always know which visitors are judges and which are not, they're motivated to stick around their poster and talk to people. This really helps the newest members of our Society interact in a lively and compelling way with the community.

Here are the results of the AAS 231 Chambliss Astronomy Student Achievement Awards competition:

Graduate Student Medal Winners
  • Kyle Boone (University of California, Berkeley)
  • Yashashree Jadhav (Rochester Institute of Technology)
  • Bokyoung Kim (Georgia State University)
  • Kameswara Mantha (University of Missouri, Kansas City)
  • Chi Nguyen (Rochester Institute of Technology)
  • Trey Wenger (University of Virginia)
Graduate Student Honorable Mentions
  • Evan Bray (Pennsylvania State University)
  • Samantha Dixon (University of California, Berkeley)
  • Eileen Gonzales (City University of New York)
  • Bang Nhan (University of Colorado, Boulder)
  • Brianna Smart (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
  • Gabriel Soto (Cornell University)
Undergraduate Student Medal Winners
  • Hayley Beltz (Kalamazoo College)
  • Claire Lamman (University of Colorado, Boulder)
  • Brianna Mills (University of Louisville)
  • Evan Nunez (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona)
  • Josephine Spiegelberg (Rollins College)
Undergraduate Student Honorable Mentions
  • Leah Fulmer (National Optical Astronomy Observatory)
  • Kathleen Hamilton (University of Maryland, College Park)
  • Briley Lewis (Columbia University)
  • Imad Pasha (University of California, Berkeley)
  • Natalie Wells (New Mexico State University)
  • Alia Wofford (Elizabeth City State University)

Congratulations, all! On behalf of our Society and all of the students who entered the AAS 231 Chambliss competition, we thank our volunteer judges who were so flexible in being assigned, judging posters, and returning scores. We documented and recorded the results of 672 student-judge interactions — more than 200 per day!

If you haven't signed up to judge student posters in the past or in a while, we encourage you to do so in the future — the more judges we have, the fewer posters each judge is responsible for judging, and the more scheduling flexibility we have Your next opportunity will be at the 232nd AAS meeting in Denver, Colorado, in June 2018. You can indicate your willingness to judge posters when you submit your abstract, when you register for the meeting, or by following the link in future announcements.