Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the 2016 Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
The award honors Illingworth "in recognition of his major research programs using innovative tools and techniques to investigate the formation, history, evolution, and nature of the most distant and earliest galaxies." He is awarded the Berkeley Prize for his team's report describing significant new results, 'UV Luminosity Functions at Redshifts z~4 to z~10: 10,000 Galaxies from HST Legacy Fields,' which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal and was one of the most widely cited astrophysics papers of 2015.
The award will be presented in January 2017 at the 229th AAS meeting in Grapevine, Texas. Illingworth will give the Berkeley Prize Lecture, which is traditionally the closing plenary talk at the AAS winter meeting.
The Lancelot M. Berkeley - New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy is awarded annually for highly meritorious work in advancing the science of astronomy during the previous year. The work being recognized must have been published in a peer-reviewed journal in the calendar year prior to the AAS prize nomination deadline. The prize consists of a lecture and a monetary prize, plus travel expenses to attend an AAS meeting within 12 months to present the prize lecture.
