Catherine Cesarsky to Receive AIP's 2020 Tate Award for International Leadership in Physics

This post is adapted from an AIP press release:

The American Institute of Physics (AIP), of which the AAS is a Member Society, has announced that the recipient of the 2020 John Torrence Tate Award for International Leadership in Physics is French astrophysicist Catherine Cesarsky.

Named after the celebrated American physicist John Torrence Tate, the Tate medal was established in 1959 and is awarded by AIP every two years to non-US citizens for their leadership, research contributions, and service to the international physics community. The award consists of a certificate of recognition, a bronze medal, and a $10,000 prize.

The award committee, in selecting Cesarsky, who was elected as an Honorary Member of the AAS in 2003, praised her “for her leadership in bringing to fruition some of the most important international astronomical observatories, for her statesmanship through her approaches to the highest political leaders in France, Europe, and Chile, and for her service as president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), among other prestigious organizations.” She will be presented with the Tate medal during a plenary session of the European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting, to be held in Leiden, Netherlands, in 2021.

“Receiving the Tate award was a lovely surprise,” Cesarsky said. “Having had the luck of being a graduate student and a postdoc in the US, I am always happy when I see I am remembered in this hospitable country.”

Born in France, Cesarsky earned her master’s degree in physics from the University of Buenos Aires and her doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University. She was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1974, she joined the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), a large public research organization in France, a major player in research, development, and innovation. She became the head of astrophysics in 1985, and director of all CEA basic research in physics and chemistry in 1994.

After her stint at CEA, Cesarsky served as the director general of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). As such, she oversaw the end of construction and operation of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the early construction of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array of radio telescopes in Chile — two remarkable astronomical facilities that have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe.

She launched the European Extremely Large Telescope project, a facility, presently under construction, that promises to enable detailed studies of exoplanets, the first galaxies in the universe, and the nature of the so-called dark universe. Back in France, she became advisor to the French government for science and energy as the high commissioner for atomic energy. Since 2012, she is a high-level science advisor at CEA.

“Catherine has played a leading role in building and using many of the premier astronomical instruments of this century, from the groundbreaking Infrared Space Observatory to the VLT,” said David Helfand, chair of the AIP board of directors and former President of the AAS. “Her consummate diplomatic skills were crucial in shepherding the sometimes fractious international partners of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array consortium toward creation of one of the marvels of modern science, and her visionary launch of studies for the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope will yield enormous benefits for our exploration of the universe throughout this century.”

Cesarsky is currently working with the Square Kilometer Array Observatory consortium, an international effort, as its chair to build the world’s largest radio telescope in Australia and South Africa. The SKA promises to revolutionize understanding of the universe, addressing a wide range of questions of relevance in all areas of astrophysics. The SKA telescopes will surpass by a large margin any other radio astronomy instrument in sensitivity, resolution, and field of view.

“Powerful telescopes can detect faint sources, such as planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, or very distant objects, revealing the history of the universe,” Cesarsky said. “Large telescopes or arrays are expensive. Most often, they are unaffordable by one country alone, and they are built within international collaborations.

“They are used by a large number of astronomers from various countries, usually accessible at least in part to the best observational projects from all over the world, and the data obtained becomes public after some proprietary time of the order of one year. Not only are the telescopes the fruit of international collaborations, but the individual observing programs are often multinational, too. The astronomers of the world are in contact with each other and gather by interest and expertise rather than by nationality.”

For most of her career, Cesarsky has been in the forefront of encouraging other countries to construct optical and radio telescopes and working with international agencies and collaborations for deep space discoveries, often meeting and influencing leaders of those countries.

“Astronomy is in a golden age of discovery, which is lasting decades, to a great extent that it is driven by the huge progress of telescopes and detectors at all wavelengths," Cesarsky said. "Astronomers are particularly good at taking advantage of new technologies and at pushing them to their limits to obtain excellent observing tools. They have learned to develop large telescopes or arrays of telescopes, to catch a maximum flux of photons from every celestial source and to continually enhance the resolving power, improving the accuracy of the images obtained.”