Raffaella Margutti Awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

January 16, 2025
Congratulations to Professor Raffaella Margutti on receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. Established by President Clinton in 1996, PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their research careers. The award recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, expands awareness of careers in science and engineering, recognizes the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhances connections between research and impacts on society, and highlights the importance of science and technology for our nation’s future.
Along with Margutti, the list of PECASE awardees included four other UC Berkeley scientists: Raúl Briceño from Physics, Grace Gu and Grace O’Connell from Mechanical Engineering, and Sergey Levine from EECS. Read more about the Presidential Award: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2025/01/14/president-biden-honors-nearly-400-federally-funded-early-career-scientists/

The selection for this distinguished award was based on Professor Margutti’s NSF CAREER Grant entitled, CAREER: A Holistic Study of Compact-Object Mergers across the Electromagnetic Spectrum: Black holes (BHs) and neutron stars (NSs) are the densest objects in our Universe. Margutti’s project aims at advancing our understanding of BHs and NSs by studying their collisions in space. The violent collisions of BHs and NSs produce bursts of light that can be detected with telescopes, as well as gravitational waves (GWs) that can now be revealed with special instruments like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The ultimate goal is to reveal the final outcomes of these collisions, which will reveal how matter behaves in the most extreme physical regimes.