[ASA] Congratulations to recipients of the 2026 ASA Awards!

[Richard McDermid]

Dear ASA,

Ahead of the Annual Science Meeting in Canberra next week, the ASA is very pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 ASA Awards.

Bok Prize for outstanding research in astronomy by an Honours or eligible Masters student
Awarded to Grace Blomfield for her thesis: “Characterising the Extreme: New Observational Insights into Ultra Luminous Quasars”. Grace completed her Honours thesis at ANU, supervised by Christian Wolf and Christopher Onken.

Highly commended awarded to Taaseen Islam for his thesis “Investigating the underabundance of Gamma-ray Emission from Cosmic Rays in the Large Magellanic Cloud”. Taaseen also completed his Honours thesis at ANU, supervised by Mark Krumholz and Roland Crocker.

Charlene Heisler Prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis in astronomy
Awarded to Dr Maria Luisa Buzzo (Swinburne, now at Yale) for her thesis “The Origins of Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies” supervised by Duncan Forbes and Jean Brodie.

Highly commended awarded to Dr Bailey Skyes (Monash) for his thesis “Simulations of Core-Collapse Supernovae: Studies of Black Hole Formation and Magnetohydrodynamical Effects” supervised by Bernhard Muller.

Louise Webster Prize for outstanding research by a scientist early in their post-doctoral career
awarded as a joint award to two individual winners:
- Dr Ziteng (Andy) Wang (Curtin) for the paper: Detection of X-ray emission from a bright long-period radio transient, Nature 642, 583-586 (2025)
- Dr Takafumi Tsukui (ANU) for the paper: The emergence of galactic thin and thick discs across cosmic history, MNRAS 540, 3493–3522 (2025)

Anne Green Prize for outstanding research by a mid-career researcher
Awarded to Dr Anais Moller (Swinburne) for her expertise in cosmology and time-domain astronomy

Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize (sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons)
Awarded to Dr Louis Desdoigts (Sydney, now at Leiden University) for ∂Lux - a physical optics simulation package that is fast, differentiable, and deploys to GPU and HPC environments. It is the base package behind AMIGO: a data-driven model of the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI), the only Australian hardware on JWST.

Many congratulations to all our prize winners!

Thanks to all who either submitted or supported applications to the ASA Prizes - nominations were, as always, of a very high standard. And many thanks to all our judges (brilliantly coordinated by ASA Prize Coordinator Dr Tanya Hill) for devoting a considerable amount of their time to reading and reviewing the many excellent nominations.

As in recent years, the ASA has enlisted the services of Science in Public to promote the ASA Prize Winners through public media organisations. Look out for announcements next week during the ASM, and please feel free to forward and promote any articles, posts or other materials through your networks.

Best wishes, and hope to see many of you in Canberra next week,
Richard

----
Professor Richard McDermid
(he/him)

Director, Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO)
Director, Astrophysics and Space Technologies Research Centre
President, Astronomical Society of Australia
Macquarie University,
Sydney, Australia

T: +61 (0)2 9372 4811 / +61 (0)2 9850 4476
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