Astrophysicist Blakesley Burkhart Receives American Physical Society’s Maria Goeppert Mayer Award

The American Physical Society has named Blakesley Burkhart the winner of the 2022 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, which recognizes and enhances outstanding achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career. Burkhart is an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics.

The award will provide Burkhart opportunities to present on her achievements through public lectures in the spirit of physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics for the development of the nuclear shell model.

In its award announcement, the American Physical Society highlighted Burkhart’s “outstanding contributions to theoretical astrophysics, elucidating the physics of interstellar turbulence and its impact on star formation on multiple spatial scales.”

Burkhart joined the Flatiron Institute in August 2018. She received her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was an Einstein Fellow and a joint ITC/SMA Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Institute for Theory and Computation. In addition to her position at the Flatiron Institute, she is an assistant professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

In 2019, she received the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, which recognizes outstanding research by female postdoctoral researchers. She was selected as a 2020 Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering and a 2021 Sloan Research Fellow.