Prize Recipient

Pablo Laguna
Georgia Institute of Technology

"For contributions to numerical relativity and astrophysics; in particular, on the simulation of colliding black holes."

Pablo Laguna received his degree in physics from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitan at Iztapalapa in 1981 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. In 1992, he joined the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University. He was promoted to associate professor in 1998 and to professor in 2000. He was named associate director of both the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics and the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry in 2001. In 2008, he became professor in the Schools of Physics and of Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Laguna is founding member and first director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech until 2013 when he became chair of the School of Physics. His research is in computational astrophysics, investigating astrophysical phenomena involving binary systems with black holes and/or neutron stars. Laguna was named fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008 and elected to the Mexican Academy of Science in 2007.

Mani Tripathi, (Chair); Hakeem Olusevi; Jorge Lopez; Deborah Jackson; James Dickerson