Prize Recipient

Stephen Hoover
University of California, Los Angeles

"A Search for Ultrahigh-Energy Neutrinos and Measurement of Cosmic Ray Radio Emission with the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna."

Stephen Hoover graduated from Purdue University in 2003 with a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics. He continued his studies in physics in the graduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles. There he fell in with a group of scientific balloonists, including his advisor, Professor David Saltzberg, who taught him how to search for ultrahigh-energy neutrinos by exploiting coherent radio Cherenkov radiation. He was soon whisked away to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, there to help operate ANITA, a NASA long-duration balloon experiment. ANITA has not yet detected neutrinos, but Stephen was delighted to discover the signa-ture of geosynchrotron radiation from ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray airshowers instead. He re-ceived his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2010. Dr. Hoover now works at the University of Chicago as a McCormick Fellow of the Enri-co Fermi Institute. Endeavoring to go even further south, he has joined the South Pole Telescope collaboration, studying cosmology through the light and shadows of the cosmic microwave back-ground.