Prize Winners 2022
The 2022 MERAC Prizes for the Best Early Career Researcher are awarded in
Theoretical Astrophysics
to Dr Helmer Koppelman (Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, USA) for his multi-faceted superb approach to the field of galactic archaeology.
Observational Astrophysics
to Dr Nuria Miret-Roig (Institut für Astrophysik, Vienna, Austria) for the discovery of about a hundred new free-floating planets.
New Technologies ((Instrumental/Computational/Multi-Messenger)
to Dr Ewelina Obrzud (Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchâtel, Switzerland) for offering interesting solutions and concrete perspectives for the improvement of existing extreme RV-precision spectrographs for astronomy.
Dr Helmer Koppelman
Theoretical Astrophysics Merac Prize: For his multi-faceted superb approach to the field of galactic archaeology, which through a combination of fine theoretical models and simulations with the newest observational datasets, is transforming our understanding of the history and dynamics of the Milky Way.
Dr Nuria Miret-Roig
Observational Astrophysics Merac Prize: For the discovery of about a hundred new free-floating planets, which allowed the study of the origin of these exotic nomad planets. For the first time, she showed that free-floating planets are not only formed by the gravitational collapse of small cores (like low-mass stars) but also in planetary systems and then ejected via dynamical interactions.
Dr Ewelina Obrzud
New Technology Merac Prize: For offering interesting solutions and concrete perspectives for the improvement of existing extreme RV-precision spectrographs for astronomy, such as NIRPS, HARPS and ESPRESSO, as well as HIRES at the future ESO ELT. This work also attracted the attention of a wider interdisciplinary community including in particular those concerned with optical precision spectroscopy and nonlinear micro-photonics.