CEHW Professor named National Finalist for the 2015 Blavatnik National Award in Physical Sciences & Engineering.
Penn State Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Eric Ford, has been named one of eleven National Finalists for the 2015 Blavatnik National Award in Physical Sciences & Engineering. The annual Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, recognize and support America’s top young scientific innovators in Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry. The Finalists were selected from 300 nominations of highly qualified faculty-rank researchers from 147 of the nation’s leading academic and research institutions.
Ford joined the Penn State Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds faculty in 2013, as part of the Penn State Institute for CyberScience’s transformative cluster hiring initiative, utilizing computation and data-enabled science and engineering to lead through cyber-enabled innovation in interdisciplinary research. As a Blavatnik National Finalist, Ford is being recognized for developing “computational and statistical methods to analyze space telescope data to characterize planets beyond the Solar System.” Ford advises students and postdoctoral researchers engaging in interdisciplinary research contributing to Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets & Habitable Worlds, Center for Astrostatistics and the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, as well as the Institute for CyberScience.
On August 5-6, 2015, the Academy and the Blavatnik Family Foundation will host its second annual Blavatnik Science Symposium featuring research of the 2015 National Finalists and Blavatnik Awards honorees from previous years. The National Laureates and Finalists will be honored at an annual awards ceremony on Monday, September 28th, 2015 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
