AAS Doxsey Travel Prize Recipients for 2020

The Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize — established through the support of his father, John Doxsey, and other friends, family, and colleagues — provides graduate students and recent PhD recipients/postdocs within one year of receiving or receipt of their PhD a monetary prize to enable the oral presentation of their dissertation research at a winter meeting of the AAS. The first awards were made for the 217th AAS meeting in Seattle, Washington, in January 2011.

There were 111 entries for the 2020 Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize competition, out of 158 total oral dissertation abstracts submitted for the 235th AAS meeting in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Choosing only a small number of these to win the prize from among so many worthy entrants was not easy — especially since our judges have noted that the abstracts seem to get better every year!

In all, 10 Doxsey 2020 prize winners and 5 honorable mentions were selected. All of them received complimentary registration for the Honolulu meeting. In addition, the prize winners received a modest stipend to reimburse some of their travel expenses. Prize winners and honorable mentions came from a diverse group of institutions and geographical locations.

Following are the 2020 Doxsey prize winners and honorable mentions:

Winners (PhD Institution)

• Chad Bustard (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
• William Chick (University of Wyoming)
• Hannah Diamond-Lowe (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)
• Pradip Gatkine (University of Maryland, College Park)
• Allison Gullingsrud (University of Toledo)
• Neda Hejazi (Georgia State University)
• Anna Ho (California Institute of Technology)
• Pallavi Patil (University of Virginia)
• Anowar Shajib (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Alexander Stephan (University of California, Los Angeles)

Honorable Mentions (PhD Institution)

• Mojgan Aghakhanloo (Florida State University)
• Thankful Cromartie (University of Virginia)
• Jane Huang (Harvard University)
• Emily Moravec (University of Florida)
• Mengtao Tang (University of Arizona)

Much gratitude goes out to this year’s volunteer Doxsey Prize judges for their earnest efforts:

• Nimish Hathi (Space Telescope Science Institute)
• Jennifer Bartlett (US Naval Observatory)
• Sarah Higdon (Georgia Southern University)