Department of Astronomy

The Owens Family Foundation has selected Nitya Kallivayalil as a recipient of their funding in the amount of $84,000 per year over a three year period. This gift will be used to further her research in near field cosmology and will enable the hiring of a prize postdoctoral fellow to work on resolved stellar populations in the local universe. The Owens Family Foundation has historically funded groundbreaking basic science research that is high risk high reward with a focus on methodological developments.

The Astronomy Department is pleased to announce that Amina Diop has been selected as the first John F. Angle Graduate Fellow in Astronomy. The Angle Fellowships are funded by a gift from Carol Angle and Fritz Angle. They honor Dr. John F. Angle MD (below), who is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in vascular and interventional radiology at UVa. He specializes in minimally invasive techniques to treat peripheral arterial disease, aortic aneurysm disease, venous insufficiency, venous thromboembolic disease, dialysis access maintenance, and cancerous tumors.

An international research group led by a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Virginia’s Department of Astronomy identified a rich organic chemistry in young disks surrounding 50 newly formed stars. Read more here. 

John Hawley, Hamilton and VITA Professor of Astronomy and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was recently named as a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.   John was cited “For pioneering work in computational astrophysics and its application to studies of accretion disks and jets.” More information here: https://aas.org/grants-and-prizes/aas-fellows