Congratulations to PhD student Mor Rozner who won the Raynor L. Duncombe Student Research Prize during the 2022 53rd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division on Dynamical Astronomy (DDA), at the Flatiron Institute in NYC. The Raynor L. Duncombe Student Research Prizes are awarded annually to a small number of students, on a competitive basis.

Mor was given the prize for her PhD research under the supervision of Prof. Hagai Perets, that includes, among other things, stellar and planetary formation and dynamics, including compact objects and black holes. Recently, her research focused on the dynamics of objects in gaseous environments, in different scales between planetary to black holes and the formation of gravitational waves. In planetary dynamics, she studies barriers in the early stages of planet formation as well as their dynamics in later stages, such as the formation of Pluto-Charon (Pluto’s moon) and hot Jupiters.

Recently, Mor has been studying formation mechanisms of planets in distorted disks. On the dynamics of objects in gaseous environments, she works on gas-assisted gravitational waves and binary formation. While gas-assisted gravitational waves in Active Galactic Nuclei disks were studied extensively, Hagai and Mor suggested looking also at globular clusters. While these are gas-dilute nowadays, in early stages of the cluster, star formation (second or further generations) enriched these clusters with gas. Together with postdoctoral fellow Aleksey Generozov, they study the possibilities to apply gas-assisted binary formation in further gas-rich environments.

Mor also won the Azrieli Fellowship 2021-2022.

Congratulations Mor!