Royal Astronomical Society honours Astrophysics staff

Five members of the Department have been commended by the Royal Astronomical Society in their 2014 awards:

Individual awards

Winton Capital Award in Astronomy

Dr Benjamin Joachimi

"Dr Joachimi's work already spans a range of topics in cosmic shear research, from high-precision measurement of covariance matrices, through new measures such as three-point functions and magnification, to mitigation of systematics. In particular he has already established himself as a world leader in the subject of galaxy intrinsic alignments, whose effect would ruin the promise of lensing for cosmology if ignored."

The Gerald Whitrow Lecture

Professor Ofer Lahav

"Prof. Lahav has made pioneering contributions to cosmology by using novel statistical techniques to exploit galaxy survey data, and has played influential leadership roles in observational cosmology. His early work established for the first time that the Milky Way is moving towards nearby concentrations of galaxies, and he quickly realised that these galaxy flows could be used to measure the density of the universe."

Group Awards

Geophysics Group Achievement Award awarded to the Cassini Magnetometer Team

Dr Nick Achilleos is a member of the The Cassini Magnetometer Team: "The Magnetometer Team have played a critical role from the beginning of the Cassini-Huygens mission and will be there right until the end."

Astronomy Group Achievement Award awarded to The Herschel-SPIRE Consortium

Members of the team include Prof. Bruce Swinyard, Dr Giorgio Savini and Prof. Mike Barlow: "The fantastic success of Herschel-SPIRE is a fitting tribute to all those scientists and engineers who have contributed to the project over many years. The impact of observations obtained using SPIRE will continue to influence and advance astrophysics well into the future."

Further information:

• Royal Astronomical society awards announcement