Peter and Patrica Gruber Foundation Fellowship 2010 awarded to Smadar Naoz

13 April 2010

The PPGF annually awards a fellowship of $50,000 to a postdoctoral candidate selected by the IAU.  From a field of truly excellent candidates the IAU has selected Smadar Naoz from Israel as the 2010 Fellow to study in the United States.

After studying the spiral arms of the Milky Way for her Master’s Degree at the Racah Institute of the Hebrew University, Smadar completed her Ph.D. studies at the Tel Aviv University, where she studied the formation of the first generation of galaxies and the use of 21cm fluctuations as a probe for this era.  

Smadar is currently working at the Northwestern University's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) together with Professor Vicky Kalogera and with Professor Fred Rasio. As a PPGF Fellow, she plans to investigate the global properties of galactic globular cluster systems, using state-of-the-art cosmological simulations, as well as the connection between the early galaxies in the Universe, globular clusters and black holes.