NASA Announces 2009 Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellows

Rhea Borja 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Rhea.R.Borja@jpl.nasa.gov

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2009-028 February 25, 2009

NASA Announces 2009 Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellows

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has selected fellows in three areas of astronomy and astrophysics for its
Einstein, Hubble and Sagan Fellowships. The recipients of this year's post-doctoral fellowships will
conduct independent research at institutions around the country.

"The new fellows are among the best and brightest young astronomers in the world," said Jon Morse,
director of the Astrophysics Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "They
already have contributed significantly to studies of how the universe works, the origin of our cosmos
and whether we are alone in the cosmos. The fellowships will serve as a springboard for scientific
leadership in the years to come, and as an inspiration for the next generation of students and early
career researchers."

Each fellowship provides support to the awardees for three years. The fellows may pursue their
research at any host university or research center of their choosing in the United States. The new
fellows will begin their programs in the fall of 2009.

"I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to spending the next few years conducting
research in the U.S., thanks to the fellowships," said Karin Oberg, a graduate student in Leiden, The
Netherlands. Oberg will study the evolution of water and ices during star formation when she starts
her fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

A diverse group of 32 young scientists will work on a wide variety of projects, such as understanding
supernova hydrodynamics, radio transients, neutron stars, galaxy clusters and the intercluster
medium, supermassive black holes, their mergers and the associated gravitational waves, dark energy,
dark matter and the re-ionization process. Other research topics include searching for transits among
hot Neptunes and super-Earths, microlensing planets through modeling algorithms, conducting high-
contrast imaging surveys to detect planetary-mass companions, interferometrically imaging the inner
regions of protoplanetary disks and modeling of super-Earth planetary atmospheres.

The Sagan Fellowship, created in September 2008, supports five scientists whose research is aligned
with NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The primary goal of this program is to discover and
characterize planetary systems and Earth-like planets around other stars. The NASA Exoplanet
Science Institute, which is operated at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in
coordination with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, administers the Sagan
Fellowship Program.

The 10 fellows in the Einstein program conduct research broadly related to the mission of NASA's
Physics of the Cosmos Program. Its science goals include understanding the origin and destiny of the
universe, the nature of gravity, phenomena near black holes, and extreme states of matter. The
Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass., administers the Einstein Fellowships for NASA.

The 17 awardees of the Hubble Fellowship pursue research associated with NASA's Cosmic Origins
Program. The missions in this program examine the origins of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems,
and the evolution of these structures with cosmic time. The Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, Md., administers the Hubble Fellowships for NASA.

A full list of the 2009 fellows and other information about these programs is available at:

http://nexsci.caltech.edu/sagan/fellowship.shtml

http://cxc.harvard.edu/fellows

http://www.stsci.edu/institute/org/spd/hubble-fellowship/

For more information about NASA's Astrophysics Division, visit:

http://nasascience.nasa.gov/astrophysics

-end-

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