Chambliss Student Poster Awards for AAS 236

The AAS Vice-Presidents decided that for the 236th AAS meeting we would dispense with printed posters and instead have only digital interactive iPosters. This meant that judging for the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards competition would be a bit different than for past meetings. Little did we know! By the time the meeting convened in early June, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced us to switch to a fully virtual conference rather than the in-person gathering we'd originally scheduled in Madison, Wisconsin!

Surprisingly — but happily — we had about twice as many attendees at the virtual meeting than we'd have had in Madison, including a disproportionately larger number of students. The Chambliss competition, held entirely online, attracted no fewer than 50 graduate students and 30 undergraduates.

For many students in the competition, this was their first time presenting at an AAS meeting as well as their first time attending one. Despite the challenges of doing everything remotely, many judges expressed that being a Chambliss judge and interacting with students about their research was rewarding, fun, and gratifying.

Here are the winners of the AAS 236 Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards:

Graduate Student Medalists

• Anthony Taylor (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
• Mindy Townsend (University of Kansas)
• Levi Walls (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

Graduate Student Honorable Mentions

• Amy Glazier (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
• Sean Lewis (Drexel University)
• Cicero Lu (Johns Hopkins University)

Undergraduate Medalists

• Tyler Hagen (Minnesota State University)
• Francisco Mendez (University of Florida, Gainesville)
• Jared Siegel (University of Chicago)

Undergraduate Honorable Mentions

• Andrew M. Hoffman (University of California, Berkeley)
• Yukei Murakami (University of California, Berkeley)

Congratulations, all! On behalf of our Society and all of the students who entered the AAS 236 Chambliss competition, we thank our volunteer judges who were so flexible in being assigned, judging iPosters, and returning scores.

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 237th AAS meeting scheduled in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2021. You can indicate your willingness to judge posters when you submit your abstract, when you register for the meeting, or by following the link that'll be included in future announcements.