Uddipan Banik, Joint Research Associate & Member, IAS has received the Dirk Brouwer Memorial Prize from Yale University. The Dirk Brouwer Memorial Prize is awarded to recent graduates of the Yale Astronomy Department for outstanding PhD theses of unusual merit in any branch of astronomy. We are delighted that Uddipan Banik, who came from Yale to become a Research Associate and Member of the Institute of Advanced Study, has received the Brouwer Prize. The Prize was established in 1966 by friends of Professor Dirk Brouwer, Chairman of the Department of Astronomy and Director of Yale Observatory from 1941 to 1966. Below is the title and abstract of Uddipan’s thesis. Congratulations, Uddipan!

“Pushing the Frontiers of Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Collisionless and Weakly Collisional Self-Gravitating Systems" 

In his dissertation, Uddipan developed novel theories to model the relaxation/equilibration of galaxies. He developed a comprehensive perturbative formalism to describe how the response of a stellar disk to perturbations (e.g., satellite impacts) phase-mixes away, triggering phase-space spirals like those observed by Gaia in the Milky Way. He also developed a novel formalism for the secular evolution (dynamical friction) of a massive perturber due to the near-resonant response of the host galaxy, which can explain hitherto unexplained secular phenomena in cored galaxies, namely core-stalling and dynamical buoyancy. These have profound astrophysical implications, e.g. the formation of off-center perturbers in cored galaxies and the potential choking of supermassive black hole mergers therein.