The 2015 MERAC Prize for the Best Early Career Researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics is awarded to Dr. Sylvestre Lacour for his development of pupil masking and pupil
remapping observing techniques, which provide a unique combination of high contrast and high angular resolution to study the immediate environment of stars.

The 2015 MERAC Prize for the Best Early Career Researcher in Observational Astrophysics is awarded to Dr. Saskia Hekker for her ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of the internal structure of red-giant stars. She was first to establish non-radial oscillations in high-precision time-resolved spectroscopy of such stars and played a key role to confirm such modes in CoRoT space data. She also developed innovative techniques used to analyse and interpret Kepler observations of red giants.

The 2015 MERAC Prize for the Best Early Career Researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics is awarded to Dr. Michela Mapelli for her eclectic theoretical and computational contributions to the dynamics of star clusters and galaxies, the reionization epoch, star formation in the Galactic centre, and the formation of massive stellar black holes from the collapse of metal-poor stars.