Claire Murray Receives NRAO Bob Brown Dissertation Award

The 2017 Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award has been given to 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 MS (2013) and PhD (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.

The Robert L. Brown Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award is administered by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), and NRAO on behalf of Bob Brown’s friends and family to honor his life and career. The award is given each year to a recent recipient of a doctoral degree, from any recognized degree-granting institution in the United States, that is substantially based on new observational data obtained at any AUI facility and is considered to be of an exceptionally high scientific standard. Applications for the 2018 award should be sent to [email protected] no later than 31 December 2018.