Congratulations to Dr Alexandra Amon who has been awarded The Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2018

The Royal Astronomical Society has awarded The Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2018 to Dr Amon for her thesis entitled ‘Cosmology with the Kilo-Degree Lensing Survey’.

Alexandra completed her undergraduate and PhD at the School of Physics and Astronomy after growing up on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was advised by Prof. Catherine Heymans. Since then she has been working as a Kavli Fellow at Stanford University/SLAC, USA. There she spends her time working as part of the Dark Energy Survey toward the highest-precision weak lensing analysis to date. This analysis is a team effort geared towards testing the model that describes our Universe and shedding insights into dark matter and dark energy.

The Royal Astronomical Society presents several awards, medals and prizes as part of its remit to support and encourage scientists working in the fields of astronomy and geophysics. The Michael Penston Prize for the best doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics is awarded annually.