Prize Recipient

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
University of California, Santa Cruz

"For innovations in mentoring, such as the Lamat Program, all of which have demonstrated how members of historically marginalized populations can thrive, lead, and advance scientific enterprise in astronomy and related fields."

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is a Professor and the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). After studying at the University of Cambridge, he was the John Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Since joining the UCSC faculty in 2007, Ramirez-Ruiz has won a number of awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, the Niels Bohr Professorship from the DNRF, the Bouchet Award from the APS and the HEAD Mid-Career Prize from the AAS. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Ramirez-Ruiz is eager to understand our origins and, in some cases, is simply wild about things that go bang in the night sky. He works with computer models to understand the cataclysmic death of stars and recently led efforts to uncover the origin of the heaviest elements in the universe. Ramirez-Ruiz tests out his theories with complex computer simulations that defy the boundaries of human experience and the assumptions we make about the universe. He has authored or co-authored about two hundred and sixty research papers, two dozen in Science and Nature. He has lectured, broadcast and written widely on science and is a highly decorated teacher and research adviser. As the director of the Lamat Institute, he works vigorously to support the promotion and retention of women and historically marginalized students in STEM.

Roxanne Hughes (Chair), Shireen Adenwalla, E. Dan Dahlberg, Heide Doss, Shannon Greco, James Kakalios, Christina Love, Duwage Perera, Artemis Spyrou, Rebecca Thompson