Prize Recipient

Blakesley Burkhart
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

"For outstanding contributions to theoretical astrophysics, elucidating the physics of interstellar turbulence and its impact on star formation on multiple spatial scales."

Blakesley Burkhart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers and an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Simons Foundation. She received her bachelor's degree in physics and in mathematics from the University of Louisville in 2008 and her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2014. She then was an Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before joining the faculty at Rutgers. Burkhart is a leader in the study of magnetic turbulence within galaxies and in the intergalactic medium. Her areas of focus include star formation and the turbulent nature of galaxies near and far. Guided by analytic theory, she employs innovative techniques to compare observational data with numerical simulations. She is a co-science lead for Hyperion, a proposed FUV space telescope that investigates the birth clouds of stars using a high-resolution spectrometer. She is a 2020 Packard Fellow, a 2021 Sloan Fellow and her honors and awards include the 2019 AAS Annie Jump Cannon Award and the 2017 Robert J. Trumpler award.

Qiuzi Li (Chair), Yingmei Liu, Hume Feldman, Phiala Shanahan (’21 Recipient)