An award, sponsored by the Division of Gravitational Physics, for best presentation by a student will be made at each of the following annual regional meetings (Midwest Relativity Meeting, East Coast Gravity Meeting, Gulf Coast Gravity Meeting, Jim Isenberg Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting).
The award is $200 and gives the recipient the right to advertise her/himself as winning the Division of Gravitational Physics Best Student Presentation at the particular meeting.
Criteria governing the award:
- The only candidates are those who have not yet officially received PhD degrees.
- A member of the Division shall organize the judging of presentations. Judges may include faculty members and postdoctoral associates, but are not to include students.
- The criteria for winning shall be a continuation of the criteria previously used for the award of the Bell prize at Pacific Coast Gravity Meetings. This means, in particular, that the quality of the research and of the presentation will be weighted as the judges see fit.
- The Division member taking responsibility for organizing the judging will notify the Secretary-Treasurer, in advance of the meeting, and will notify the Secretary-Treasurer of the outcome of the judging, including contact information for the winner. The Secretary-Treasurer will then arrange to have the prize money sent to the winner.
- The prize can be split, but this is strongly discouraged.
Winners
Congratulations to all of our past winners:
| Year | Meeting | Speaker | Talk title |
| 2024 | MRM 34 | Alexandra Hanselman (UChicago) | A simple model for extracting astrophysics from black hole images. |
| 2024 | GCGM 10 | Purnima Narayan (UMiss) | Impact of Strong Gravitational Lensing on GR Tests with BBH Signals |
| 2024 | PCGM 40 | Elliott Gesteau (Caltech) | Renormalizing sums over topologies |
| 2023 | MRM 33 | Amanda Farah (UChicago) | No need to know: Astrophysics-agnostic spectral siren cosmology |
| 2023 | EGM 23 | Aviral Prakash (Penn State) | QCD Phase Transitions in Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Simulations and Detectability |
| 2023 | PCGM 39 | Yangyang Cai (University of Arizona) | Principal null directions as trajectories of ultrarelativistic charged particles with radiation reaction |
| 2022 | MRM 32 | Jann Zosso (ETHZ & UIUC) | Cosmological tensions guiding the path beyond ΛCDM |
| 2022 | PCGM 38 | Keefe Mitman (Caltech) | The Importance of BMS Frames for Gravitational Wave Modeling |
| 2021 | MRM 31 | Daine Danielson (Chicago) | Vacuum Fluctuations Protect Causality in Quantum Gravity |
| 2021 | PCGM 37 | Erik Wessel (Arizona) | Gravitational Waves from Accretion Disk Instabilities |
| 2020 | MRM 30 | Lindsay DeMarchi (Northwestern) | Multi Messenger Observations of TZOs |
| 2019 | EGM 22 | Elizabeth Bennewitz (Bodwin College) and Dante Iozzo (Cornell) | Black-hole accretion in the presence of Dark Matter heating, and Limitations of Weyl Scalar Extraction |
| 2019 | MRM 29 | Alvaro Ballon Bordo (Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo) | Thermodynamics of Lorentzian Taub-NUT spacetimes |
| 2019 | PCGM 35 | Jacob Fields (BYU) | Relativistic hydrodynamics with wavelet adaptive multi-resolution. |
| 2018 | MRM28 | Maya Fishbach (University of Chicago) | A standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant from GW170817 without the electromagnetic counterpart |
| 2018 | EGM21 | Laura Johnson (CWRU) | Partially Massless Decoupling Limit of Massive Gravity |
| 2018 | EGM21 | Oliver Janssen (NYU) | The no-boundary proposal: alive and well |
| 2018 | PCGM34 | Maria Okounkova (Caltech) | On choosing the start time of binary black hole ringdown |
| 2017 | MWRM27 | Katelyn Breivik (Northwestern) | Revealing the Milky Way’s black hole population with Gaia |
| 2017 | EGM20 | Beatrice Bonga (Penn State) | On the Conceptual Confusion in the Notion of Transverse-Traceless Modes |
| 2017 | EGM20 | Rahul Kashyap (U MassDartmouth) | Type Ia Supernovae through Spiral Instability in Binary White Dwarf Mergers |
| 2017 | PCGM33 | Maximiliano Isi (Caltech) | Polarizations of continuous gravitational waves in the advanced detector era |
| 2016 | MWRM26 | Zoheyr Doctor (University of Chicago) | Gravitational Wave Emulation Using Gaussian Process Regression |
| 2016 | EGM19 | Jim Mertens (CWRU) | Computing Observables in an Inhomogeneous Universe using Numerical Relativity |
| 2016 | PCGM32 | Matt Giesler (Caltech) | Nearly extremal binary black hole simulations |
| 2015 | EGM18 | Béatrice Bonga (Penn State) | The quadrupole formula with a positive cosmological constant |
| 2015 | GCGM8 | Hector Okada da Silva (Ole Miss) | A post-TOV formalism for relativistic stars |
| 2015 | MRM25 | Hsin-Yu Chen (University of Chicago) | Optimizing gravitational wave sources followup strategies |
| 2014 | EGM17 | Philippe Landry (Guelph) | Relativistic theory of surficial Love numbers |
| 2014 | MRM24 | Kartik Prabhu (University of Chicago) | Growth rate of black hole instabilities |
| 2013 | GCGM7 | Laleh Sadeghian (WUSTL) | Dark matter distributions around massive black holes: A fully general relativistic approach |
| 2013 | MRM23 | Ben Farr (Northwestern) | |
| 2012 | MRM22 | Justin Ellis (UWM) | |
| 2012 | PCGM28 | Benson Way (UCSB) | Finite Size Effects in Holographic Superconductors |
| 2011 | MRM21 | Stephen Green (University of Chicago) | |
| 2010 | MRM20 | Benjamin Lackey (UWM) | |
| 2009 | MRM19 | Sam Gralla (University of Chicago) | Electromagnetic Analog of Binary Black Hole Bobbing and Kicks |
| 2008 | GCGM4 | Ian Vega (University of Florida) | Field regularization for self-force problems |
| 2008 | MRM18 | Sam Gralla (University of Chicago) | |
| 2007 | MRM17 | Jocelyn Read (UWM) | |
| 2007 | GCGM3 | Enrique Pazos (LSU) | The effects of the background geometry on the extracted waveforms |
| 2006 | MRM16 | Nicolas Yunes (Penn State) | How to Kick a Hole and Other Eccentric Stories |
| 2005 | MRM15 | Branson Stephens | |
| 2005 | EGM8 | Chad Middleton (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) | Constrained Perturbative Expansion of the DGP Model |
| 2005 | PCGM21 | Joey Shapiro-Key (Montana State University) | Extending the WMAP Bound on the Size of the Universe |
| 2004 | PCGM20 | Henriette Elvang (UCSB) | Black Rings: Non-uniqueness of Black Holes in Supergravity |
| 2004 | PCGM20 | Louis Rubbo (Montana State University) | Identification and Subtraction of Bright Galactic Binaries from LISA Data |
| 2004 | MRM14 | Ishai Ben-Dov (University of Chicago) | |
| 2003 | MRM13 | William Komp (UWM) | |
| 2003 | PCGM19 | Henriette Elvang (UCSB) | Bubbles and Black Holes |
| 2002 | MRM12 | Matthew Duez (UIUC) | |
| 2000 | PCGM16 | Veronika Hubeny (UCSB) | Quasinormal modes of Schwarzschild-AdS black holes and their relevance for gauge theories |
| 1999 | PCGM15 | Teviet Creighton (Caltech) | Atmospheric gravity gradients: a low-frequency noise limit for LIGO |
| 1997 | PCGM13 | Teviet Creighton (Caltech) | Search techniques for periodic gravitational waves |
| 1994 | PCGM10 | Rhett Herman (Montana State University) | Charged pair production in the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole interior |
If you know of a winner not listed here, please contact us.