Blakesley Burkhart is an astrophysicist. She is the winner of the 2017
Robert J. Trumpler Award
The Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is given annually to a recent recipient of the Ph.D degree whose thesis is judged particularly significant to astronomy.Astronomical Society of the Pacific, which recognizes a Ph.D. thesis that is "particularly significant to astronomy." She also is the winner of the 2019
Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy
The Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to a woman resident of North America, who is within five years of receipt of a PhD, for distinguished contributions to astronomy or for similar ...
Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award
The Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award is an annual prize presented by the American Physical Society in recognition of an outstanding contribution to physics research by a woman. It recognizes and enhances outstanding achievements by women physicists in t ...
. The awards both cited her work on
magnetohydrodynamic turbulence Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence concerns the chaotic regimes of magnetofluid flow at high Reynolds number. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) deals with what is a quasi-neutral fluid with very high conductivity. The fluid approximation implies that the focu ...
, and for developing innovative techniques for comparing observable astronomical phenomena with theoretical models.
Career
Burkhart completed her Ph.D. in astronomy at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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 Stat ...
in 2014. Her dissertation explores "connections between theoretical, numerical, and observational understanding of agnetohydrodynamic turbulenceas it applies to the neutral, ionized, and molecular interstellar medium." She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She has made contributions to many other fields outside of plasma turbulence, including star formation, the intergalactic medium, globular cluster formation, and UV space telescope design. She worked with Mark R. Krumholz and others to develop a unified model of disc galaxies, working to explain why disc galaxies have a lower rate of star formation than is predicted by other models. In August 2018, she became an associate research scientist at the
Flatiron Institute
The Flatiron Institute is an internal research division of the Simons Foundation, launched in 2016. It comprises five centers for computational science: the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA); the Center for Computational Biology (CCB); ...
's Center for Computational Astrophysics. She has been working as an assistant professor at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...
in the department of Physics and Astronomy since September 2019.
She was the host of the ''5 Minute Astronomy'' podcast from 89.9FM WORT in
Madison Madison may refer to:
People
* Madison (name), a given name and a surname
* James Madison (1751–1836), fourth president of the United States
Place names
* Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital of Wisconsin and the largest city known by this ...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is a part of Harvard University that fosters interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, a ...
, Harvard, October 14, 2016
Awards received
* Jansky Award,
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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 Stat ...
, Department of Astronomy, 2011
*
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
's Wisconsin
Space Grant
The space-grant colleges are educational institutions in the United States that comprise a network of fifty-two consortia formed for the purpose of outer space-related research. Each consortium is based in one of the fifty states, the District o ...
Fellowship, 2013-14
*
Robert J. Trumpler Award
The Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is given annually to a recent recipient of the Ph.D degree whose thesis is judged particularly significant to astronomy.Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy
The Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to a woman resident of North America, who is within five years of receipt of a PhD, for distinguished contributions to astronomy or for similar ...
Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award
The Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award is an annual prize presented by the American Physical Society in recognition of an outstanding contribution to physics research by a woman. It recognizes and enhances outstanding achievements by women physicists in t ...