This year the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy was presented to CITA faculty Maya Fishbach for her “major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe”.
The Annie Jump Cannon Award is given every year for outstanding research and promise for future research to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her PhD.
Professor Fishbach is also on one of the first eight interdisciplinary LSST teams that received the 2024 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards. Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Scialog format aims to accelerate breakthroughs by building a creative network of scientists that crosses disciplinary silos, and by stimulating intensive conversation around a scientific theme of global importance. ‘Scialog: Early Science with the LSST’ is a three-year initiative that aims to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
Fishbach is internationally recognized for her leadership within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. She chairs the ‘Rates & Populations’ group tasked with inferring the astrophysical implications of the gravitational-wave source population and has made significant contributions to 14 LIGO Collaboration papers and co-authored 37 additional, non-LIGO publications. In just the past 6 years Fishbach has given 26 invited conference talks, 15 public talks, and 34 invited seminars or colloquia at departments around the world.
Dr. Fishbach’s groundbreaking research has already been distinguished by prestigious honors and awards such as the 2023 John Charles Polanyi Prize for “excellence and potential of research in Physics” and the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Fishbach’s work has also garnered significant public interest and has been featured over 20 times in the media, including a full-length interview by Alan Alda on his ‘Science Clear & Vivid’ podcast.