The Ken and Julie Michael Prizes recognise the outstanding achievements of our graduate students at both ICRAR nodes.
The 2024 award recipients are Tyrone O’Doherty from ICRAR/Curtin and Andrei Ristea from ICRAR/UWA.
The Ken & Julie Michael Prizes were made possible by a generous donation from former chair of the ICRAR Board, Dr Ken Michael AC, and recognise the achievements of ICRAR’s graduate students. This year’s prizes were presented by Dr Michael during end of November’s Board meeting in the presence of the WA Minister of Science, the Hon Stephen Dawson, supervisors, the ICRAR Board, and Curtin Vice Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne.
Dr Ken Michael presents the 2024 Ken and Julie Michael prize to ICRAR/Curtin student Tyrone O’Doherty
Tyrone O’Doherty (ICRAR/Curtin) investigates and develops methods of finding hidden black holes in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Current estimates place the number of black holes in our Galaxy at approximately 100 million, and yet we confidently know of only 30. Tyrone leverages data from an array of state-of-the-art telescopes around the world and in space to study and search for black holes. He works on developing new techniques for identifying black hole candidates through searching for imprints of their formation and signatures of their presence. He is also interested in studying and characterising newly identified black hole candidates to help refine and develop existing methods of searching for black holes.
Dr Ken Michael presents the 2024 Ken and Julie Michael prize to ICRAR/UWA student Andrei Ristea
Andrei Ristea (ICRAR/UWA) focuses on the field of extragalactic Astronomy. He studies the kinematics of stars and gas in galaxies from the Nearby Universe using Integral-Field Spectroscopic (IFS) data from the SAMI and MaNGA surveys. He is particularly interested in the differences between the rotation of stars and gas as a probe of the processes that shape galaxies throughout their evolution. His first PhD project focused on the kinematic misalignments between the rotation of stars and gas in the SAMI Galaxy Survey, while his second project focused on constructing a sample with stellar and gas kinematics from the MaNGA Galaxy Survey.
ICRAR congratulates the winners and their supervisors, and all the applicants for their achievements. We thank Dr Ken Michael for his generous support for this Prize, first awarded in 2017 to Chenoa Tremblay & Tristan Reynolds, in 2018 to Ahmed Elagali & Sam McSweeney, in 2019 to Mengyao Xue & Fei Qin, in 2020 to Dr Pikky Atri, Dr Kate Harborne & Benjamin Dix-Matthews, in 2021 to Stefan Duchesne, James Buchan & Ruby Wright, in 2022 to Torrance Hodgson, Jishnu Thekkeppattu, Jessica Thorne & Mitchell Cavanagh, and in 2023 to Angelica Waszewski, Skevos Karpathakis & Jennifer Hardwick.
The 2024 Ken & Julie Michael Prize winners with Dr Ken Michael AC (front) and supervisors, members of the ICRAR board and executive (back).
