Congratulations to Alicia Soderberg

Alicia Soderberg is the winner of the 2009 Annie Jump Cannon award.  This very prestigious award is given by the American Astronomical Society to a female astronomer, at most 5 years post-Ph.D., for “outstanding research and promise for future research.”

I taught Alicia when she was an undergraduate at Bates College.  In fact, I think I was nominally the advisor for her senior thesis or something.  I say “nominally,” because I really had little or nothing to do with it: her thesis work was with a group at Harvard, and she  really worked with them, not me.   (Even so, I’m a bit embarrassed that I can’t remember for sure whether I was her advisor: I don’t think that there are any other students about whom I’m unsure whether I was  their research advisor!)

By the way, if you don’t know who Annie Jump Cannon was, you should read about her.  She did very important work in astronomy, figuring out the classification of stars that is still used today, at a time when women were largely excluded from science. Despite the importance of hr work, she was denied full recognition, only receiving a proper academic appointment very late in her career.