Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture

The Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture was given by a distinguished physicist in honor of Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley, the first female professor of astronomy at Yale, where she worked from 1974 until her death in 1981. Her work on disk galaxies has proven foundational in the decades following her passing. In 2018, the Yale Society of Physics Students inaugurated the Beatrice Tinsley Prize Lecture, which saw the invitation of Asimina Arvanitaki. The prize lecture was started to honor Tinsley’s myriad contributions and to encourage collaboration and contact between distinguished physicists and the Yale undergraduate physics community. The speaker was jointly invited and hosted by the Society of Physics Students, Women in Physics, and undergraduate students from Astronomy.

Starting in 2022, the life and accomplishments of Beatrice Tinsley will be recognized through a dedicated series of activities.

2021 (November 29): John C. Mather (NASA), “Opening the Infrared Treasure Chest with JWST” [Video]

2020 (September 26 & 30): Donna Strickland (University of Waterloo), “A Conversation with Donna Strickland”

2019 (December 5): Wolfgang Ketterle (MIT), “Ultracold atoms: From superfluid gases to spin transport”

2018 (December 5): Asimina Arvanitaki (Perimeter Institute), “Novel Directions in the Search for New Physics”