Chiara Mingarelli, Assistant Professor of Physics, and Priya Natarajan, Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics, are members of the NANOGrav collaboration, which has won a “Frontiers of Science Award” from the International Congress of Basic Science, under the Astrophysics & Cosmology area, for their paper “The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background” published in Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023). In fact, the journal has created a special focus issue on the NANOGrav results. Since its publication last June, the paper, which announced evidence for a gravitational wave background has amassed over 700 citations.
About winning this award, Chiara commented, “I am delighted to share this award with NANOGrav. After my first year at Yale I feel very well supported, and well-positioned to continue my search for supermassive black hole binaries. I look forward to working with more Yale students on gravitational wave searches, advancing this new and exciting field.”
Natarajan added, “It is a real privilege to receive this recognition as part of the NANOGrav collaboration, with the exciting result reporting first evidence for the existence of a gravitational wave background from merging supermassive black holes. As someone involved in studying various aspects of the physics of supermassive black holes since my PhD, it is thrilling to be at the precipice of what is clearly the start of a major revolution in the study of these enigmatic objects.”
The International Congress for Basic Science honors top research, with an emphasis on achievements from the past ten years which are both excellent and of outstanding scholarly value. For the 2024 selection, scientific works in both basic and applied research are chosen in 42 areas of the three basic science fields (mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer and information sciences) represented at the ICBS. A scientific achievement must meet the following three requirements to be considered: (1) it must have been published in the last 10 years; (2) it must be of highest scientific value and originality and have made an important impact on its area; (3) it must have been evaluated and accepted by scholars in its area.
The goal of this award is to encourage young scholars to look to the frontiers of basic science, set goals to obtain breakthrough results as early as possible, and contribute wisdom and energy to humankind’s study of the mysteries of the natural world.
In addition, Prof. Daniel A. Spielman (Sterling Professor of Computer Science and a Professor Statistics and Data Science and of Mathematics) won a Frontiers of Science award, under the Discrete Geometry and Graph Theory area, for his contribution to “Interlacing families I: Bipartite Ramanujan Graphs of all degrees” published in Annals of Mathematics (2015).