The RAS is pleased to announce the winners of its prizes for the best Ph.D. theses completed in the UK during 2018.
Prizes are awarded annually: the Michael Penston Prize for the best thesis in astronomy and astrophysics, the Keith Runcorn Prize for the best thesis in geophysics and planetary science, and the Patricia Tomkins Prize for the best thesis in instrumentation science for astronomy and geophysics.
The Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2018
The Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2018 has been awarded to Dr. Alexandra Amon for the thesis entitled ‘‘Cosmology with the Kilo-Degree Lensing Survey.’
Alexandra Amon completed her undergraduate and Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh with Prof. Catherine Heymans and Prof. Chris Blake, after growing up on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Since then, she is a Kavli Fellow at Stanford University/SLAC, USA, as part of Prof. Risa Wechsler’s group. There she spends her time working as part of the Dark Energy Survey’s weak lensing team.
The runner up is Dr. Antonella Palmese for the thesis entitled ‘Unveiling the unseen with the Dark Energy Survey: gravitational waves and dark matter’.
The Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize 2018
The Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize has been awarded to Dr. Ophelia Crawford for the thesis entitled ‘On the Viscoelastic Deformation of the Earth’.
Ophelia studied for her Ph.D. in the Bullard Laboratories at the University of Cambridge. There, she worked with Dr. David Al-Attar, developing methods for quantifying the sensitivity of sea level change over glacial cycles to ice sheet variations and mantle rheology. Since completing her Ph.D., Ophelia has worked for Riverlane, a quantum computing software company based in Cambridge.
The runner-up is Dr. Fred Richards for the thesis entitled ‘Global Analysis of Predicted and Observed Dynamic Topography’.
The Patricia Tompkins Thesis Prize for instrumentation has not been awarded this year.