The Robert J. Trumpler Graduate Student Excellence Award

2024

Aliza Beverage (Graduate) (Astronomy)

Nick Choksi (Graduate) (Astronomy)

Sergiy Vasylyev (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2023

Chris Moeckel (Graduate) (Earth & Planetary Science)

Kishore Patra (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2022

Nathan Sandford (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2021

Casey Lam (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2020

Kareem El-Badry (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2019

Wren Suess (Graduate) (Astronomy)

Tom Zick (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2018

Carina Cheng (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2017

Daniel Goldstein (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2016

Katherine de Kleer (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2015

Francesca Fornasini (Graduate) (Astronomy)

2014

James Gold McBride (Graduate) (Astronomy)
James McBride is fascinated by galactic evolution and structure. He has worked on the observational effect of magnetic fields in galaxy and star formation, the starburst phenomenon, AGN and angular momentum transport therein, cooling flows in clusters of galaxies, and the interaction of radio jets with the intercluster medium. He studies these through a variety of observations including full-Stokes VLBI mapping of OH megamasers.

Garrett “Karto” Keating (Graduate) (Astronomy)
Karto’s thesis research involves intensity mapping of CO at high redshifts (z ~ 5), with CARMA. He is using over a 1000 hrs on the Hubble Deep ‘Goods-North’ field, achieving sensitivities that are of interest for current cosmological models. This research involves not only astronomy–but also a very high level of statistical and instrumental analysis.

2013

Charles “Chat” Hull (Graduate) (Astronomy)
Advisor: Carl Heiles

Dick Plambeck

Chat was an observational astronomer whose research focused on polarization from protostellar disks. He completed his Ph.D. in 2014.

2012

Michael McCourt (Graduate) (Astronomy)
Advisor: Eliot Quataert

Michael McCourt, a 5th-year graduate student at Berkeley, worked with his advisor, Eliot Quataert, to understand the hot, tenuous gas filling clusters of galaxies. He led a number of studies on the physics of this gas, how it cools to form galaxies and fuel black hole growth, and how measurements of the gas can be used to infer the mass of the underlying dark matter halo. Michael is expected to graduate in spring 2014.

Jonathan Pober (Graduate) (Astronomy)
Advisor: Aaron Parsons

Donald Backer

“Jonathan Pober lost his original research advisor, Don Backer, midway through his graduate student career, but surmounted adversity to become a leading expert in the science and techniques of 21cm cosmology” according to Aaron Parsons, Pober’s current advisor. He played a key role in presenting the PAPER (Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization) experiment to the NSF, helping secure funding for the project. He adapted techniques pioneered by the PAPER project to a new science application, seeking to measure the accelerating expansion of the universe, presumably as the result of mysterious Dark Energy. Pober expects to complete his Ph.D. in 2013.

2011

Statia Luszcz-Cook (Graduate) (Astronomy)
Advisor: Imke de Pater

The first student chosen to receive the prestigious Berkeley Trumpler Award, Statia Luszcz-Cook, was announced as a recipient for her work in what could essentially be called a “double-thesis”. Luszcz-Cook observed Neptune in the near-IR with the integral-field spectrograph OSIRIS on Keck (at these wavelengths, the planet is observed in reflected sunlight) and subsequently observed Neptune’s thermal emission with CARMA at mm wavelengths, in particular the CO and HCN lines. She not only conducted the observations at these very different wavelengths, but also developed radiative transfer programs to analyze both sets of data.