Dr. Cassandra Hall Receives RAS Winton Award

Congratulations to Dr. Hall! The Royal Astronomical Society has named her winner of the 2021 Winton Award in Astronomy.

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. The Winton prizes are for research by a Post-Doctoral Fellow whose career has shown the most promising development.

Hall completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Sheffield in 2013 and earned her doctorate at the University of Edinburgh in 2017. She became one of two women in the inaugural class of Winton Exoplanet Fellows, a program that recognizes accomplished scientists in the early stage of their career and provides them with the opportunity to conduct independent research that could establish them as future leaders in their field. She relocated to the USA in 2020 to accept a position at UGA.

"We are extremely excited to learn that Dr. Hall has received the Winton Award from the UK's Royal Astronomical Society," said Phillip Stancil, professor and head of the department of physics and astronomy. "The award recognizes Dr. Hall's ground-breaking computational studies of the evolution of planetary systems, performed while she was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Leicester. After just three short months at UGA, Dr. Hall is already building an outstanding research group which will elevate UGA's reputation in computational astrophysics, leading to improved understanding of how planets form."

“Receiving this award is a huge honour,” Dr. Hall said, “and I am absolutely delighted. This award is a fantastic start to my career at the University of Georgia, and I am looking forward to many years of success here.”

In their announcement, the RAS wrote, “By connecting the theory of protoplanetary discs to observations, Dr. Hall is building a distinctive research program at the forefront of the quest to understand how planets form.”t6oq45