Chambliss Student Poster Awards for AAS 223

The latest Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards competition, which occurred at the 223rd AAS meeting in Washington, DC, earlier this month, was a record-setting event. Nearly 450 student poster authors entered the competition, of which two-thirds were undergraduates, and there were approximately 250 judges! Student posters were evaluated during the morning coffee breaks and afternoon poster sessions all four days of the meeting, not just Monday through Wednesday as in the past, partly because of the record number of posters and partly because of changes in the way posters are being scheduled into science sessions.

As a result of the longer competition, not all judges' scores were in hand by the end of the meeting, and we couldn't announce the winners before everyone went home. The last of the outstanding scores have now come in, and — at last — we have our winners:

Graduate Student Medal Winners

• Eduardo Banados (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
• Kevin Cooke (Rochester Institute of Technology)
• Laura Mayorga (New Mexico State University)
• Dylan Morgan (Boston University)
• Christina Peters (Drexel University)
• Greg Salvesen (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Graduate Student Honorable Mentions

• William Best (University of Hawaii)
• Marta Bryan (California Institute of Technology)
• Seth Cohen (Dartmouth College)
• Gregory Green (Harvard University)
• Christopher Griffith (Pennsylvania State University)
• Alex Hagen (Pennsylvania State University)
• Brandon Patel (Rutgers University)
• Dominic Pesce (Harvard University)
• Valerie Rapson (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Undergraduate Medal Winners

• Benjamin Cook (Princeton University)
• Ying Feng (Pennsylvania State University)
• Cole Johnston (Villanova University)
• Emil Khabiboulline (California Institute of Technology)
• Diana Powell (Harvard University)
• Emily Sandford (Yale University)

Undergraduate Honorable Mentions

• Juliette Becker (California Institute of Technology)
• Kelly Blumenthal (Boston University)
• Eda Gjergo (Illinois Institute of Technology)
• Kirsten Hall (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
• Anna Ho (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Laura Kulowski (Brown University)
• Allison McGraw (University of Arizona)
• Rachel Salmon (University of Scranton)
• Rachel Smullen (University of Wyoming)
• Josh Speagle (Harvard University)

Congratulations, all! On behalf of our Society and all of the students who entered the AAS 223 Chambliss competition, I would like to thank our volunteer judges, with a special thanks to those who volunteered onsite to replace judges who got stuck at home due to the bad weather that hit the DC area. I would also like to thank the AAS Executive Office staff who help to make this very important competition such a big success.