Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named three exemplary Cottrell Scholars as recipients of its 2024 STAR and IMPACT Awards. CS 1997 Mark Moldwin, Physics, University of Michigan, has won the STAR award, and CS 2009 Maura McLaughlin, Physics, West Virginia University, and CS 2009 Rory Waterman, Chemistry, University of Vermont, have won IMPACT awards.
“Excellence in teaching, research, and leadership is just the beginning for these members of the Cottrell Scholar community,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “As their careers have advanced, they have made important contributions far beyond their own disciplines and institutions.”
The STAR (Science Teaching And Research) Award recognizes outstanding research and educational accomplishments, while the IMPACT Award recognizes the work of a Cottrell Scholar or Holland Award recipient who has had a national impact in science through leadership and service. Both STAR and IMPACT awards include a $5,000 cash prize.
The awards will be presented at the 2024 Cottrell Scholar Conference, to be held July 17-19, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona. Recipients will give brief acceptance talks and will be available throughout the coming year to provide mentoring to their early career Cottrell Scholar colleagues, according to RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco.
STAR and IMPACT Award nominees must be a Cottrell Scholar at least 12 years beyond the year of their award, or a Holland Awardee regardless of the year of their award. They must also hold an academic position at a research university or primarily undergraduate institution in the United States or Canada.
IMPACT Award winner Maura McLaughlin is an international leader in astrophysics working to build pipelines for high-school students to STEM majors and careers. She founded and co-directs the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Wave Astrophysics (NANOGrav), an international collaboration engaging some 50 senior investigators from across 30 institutions in the use of millisecond pulsars to serve as a timing array for the detection of low frequency gravitational waves. Their recent discovery of the first evidence for a stochastic background of low-frequency gravitational waves received significant attention from both the press and the broader astronomical community. McLaughlin collaborated with colleagues at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to establish the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, a program to engage middle and high school students and their teachers in hands-on data analysis to identify new pulsars. Through the program, more than 2,000 students in 18 states have not just “played the part” of astronomers but have discovered seven pulsars. She served on the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey Panel charting the 10-year program of research priorities in Astronomy and currently chairs the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) for DSA-2000, an array of 2000 5-meter radio dishes planned to be built in the Nevada desert. She is co-Laureate of the 2023 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement is a private foundation that funds basic research in the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, physics, and related fields) at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. It creates and supports inclusive communities of early career researchers through two core programs, the Cottrell Scholar Program and Scialog, as well as its newly launched RCSA Fellows initiative.