On May 21, 2025 the Division on Dynamical Astronomy (DDA) announced that CITA Fellow Sam Hadden is the 2025 recipient of the Vera Rubin Early Career Award in recognition of his “term-by-term analysis of planetary dynamics, work that leads the field in both insight and usability”.
Dr. Hadden’s doctoral research used analytic perturbation theory to efficiently analyze the largest set of transit timing variations, leveraging data from NASA’s Kepler mission. He validated classical theory against real systems and advanced models of planetary resonance, from the restricted case to general two-planet systems with arbitrary masses and eccentricities. By extending Hill’s approximation beyond first-order resonances, he significantly improved our understanding of instability boundaries. This achievement addresses a longstanding challenge, tracing back to the work of Laplace, in delineating the transition from orderly motion to chaos.
With this award, DDA further recognizes Dr. Hadden’s successful co-development (with Dr. Daniel Tamayo) of open-source planetary dynamics codes, his excellent supervision of student research, and his service to the dynamical community. Dr. Hadden will be invited to give a lecture at the 57th annual DDA meeting, which will be held in Chicago in spring 2026.
As a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Dr. Hadden continues his work as a dynamicist with a focus on explaining phenomena governed by classical theories of Hamiltonian dynamics and statistical mechanics. Prior to coming to CITA, University of Toronto, he was a CfA Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dr. Hadden received his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from Northwestern University in 2017.