Aya Ishihara ( ja, 石原安野, born 1974) is a Japanese physicist who works as a professor of physics at

Chiba University is a national university in the city of Chiba, Japan. It offers Doctoral degrees in education as part of a coalition with Tokyo Gakugei University, Saitama University, and Yokohama National University. The university was formed in 1949 from exist ...

. Her research involves the search for high-energy cosmic neutrinos, including collaboration on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

Education and career

Ishihara was born in 1974 in

Shizuoka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. Shizuoka Prefecture has a population of 3,637,998 and has a geographic area of . Shizuoka Prefecture borders Kanagawa Prefecture to the east, Yamanashi Prefecture to the northea ...

. She graduated from the

Tokyo University of Science , formerly "Science University of Tokyo" or TUS, informally or simply is a private research university located in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. History Tokyo University of Science was founded in 1881 as The Tokyo Academy of Physics by 21 graduates ...

in 1998, and completed her Ph.D. in 2004 at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. She moved to

after postdoctoral research at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

involving the IceCube Observatory, and became an associate professor at Chiba University in 2016.

Recognition

Ishihara won the Young Scientist Award of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in 2013, the first neutrino astrophysicist to win this award. She was the 2017 winner of the

Saruhashi Prize The Saruhashi Prize (猿橋賞) is an annual prize awarded to a Japanese woman researcher in the natural sciences. The prize recognises accomplishments in research as well as the mentoring of other women scientists. Japanese geochemist Katsuko Sar ...

. With Shigeru Yoshida, she won the 2019 Nishina Memorial Prize for their work on high-energy cosmic neutrinos, becoming only the second woman to win this prize.

References

External links

International Center for Hadron Astrophysics
Chiba University {{DEFAULTSORT:Ishihara, Aya Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Japanese astrophysicists Women astrophysicists Japanese women physicists Neutrino physicists Tokyo University of Science alumni University of Texas at Austin alumni Academic staff of Chiba University 21st-century Japanese women scientists 21st-century Japanese physicists