Yan Liang and Stephen Majeski have been awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Fellowship by Princeton University’s Graduate School for the 2024-2025 academic year.  In the words of the citation, this honorific fellowship “recognizes outstanding performance and professional promise, and represents high commendation from the Princeton University Graduate School.” 

The goal of Yan’s research is to enable the first detections of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars using the Doppler method.  She is applying advanced techniques in machine learning to distinguish between Doppler shifts caused by a planet, and intrinsic changes in the stellar spectrum due to oscillations, turbulence, and other reasons.

During Stephen’s graduate career in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, he has made key contributions to the theoretical modeling of plasmoids and particle energization in multi-scale reconnection, and to our understanding of waves, wave interactions, and electromagnetic turbulence in weakly collisional, “high-beta”, astrophysical plasmas. His work on the latter has shown how such turbulence can self-organize to avoid viscous dissipation — a feature with implications for the amplification of magnetic fields, the propagation of cosmic rays, and thermal stability in the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters.

Congratulations to Yan and Stephen!