UQ Astrophysics student Sam Hinton has been awarded the Bok Prize for outstanding research in astronomy by an Honours or eligible Masters student in Australia. The Bok prize is awarded by the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) every year, and is named after Bart Jan Bok, who was Director of MountStromlo Observatory from 1957 to 1966. The prize consists of an award of $500 and membership of the ASA for the next calendar year.
The title of his thesis is “Extraction of Cosmological Information from WiggleZ”, based on his analysis of data from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. Sam was supervised for his Honours research by Tamara Davis, and also Chris Lidmanfrom the Australian Astronomical Observatory.
Sam is only the second UQ student to win the Bok prize since its inception in 1989. The previous winner from UQ was Peter Jensen in 2009, for his thesis
"The Colours of Galaxies in Intermediate X-ray Luminosity Galaxy Clusters".
Sam will be unable to attend the ASA Annual Scientific Meeting being held in Sydney in July to receive the award in person, as he is current visiting Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California as part of his continued PhD studies atUQ.
