Caltech Graduate Wins Prestigious Award for the Best Astronomy Thesis

PASADENA, Calif.—Edo Berger, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has won the 2007 Trumpler Award for his Caltech PhD thesis, "Cosmic Explosions: The Beasts and Their Lair." The award is given annually by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to a recent recipient of the PhD degree in North America whose research is considered unusually important to astronomy.

"I am very excited and honored to be recognized for my thesis work," says Berger. "Being a graduate student at Caltech enabled me to do cutting-edge astronomical research early in my career and to exploit a wide range of facilities and expertise to study the nature of gamma-ray bursts."

Berger's thesis provided new insights into the nature of cosmic gamma-ray bursts, some of nature's most spectacular explosions. They are believed to originate in supernova explosions of very massive stars, resulting in black holes. The thesis, supervised by Shrinivas Kulkarni, the MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, contained a number of important results and led to numerous follow-up studies.

Caltech's previous winner of this award was Michael Pahre in 2001, for his 1998 thesis on fundamental properties of elliptical galaxies, which was done under the supervision of S. George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy.