The Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago launched the Margaret Burbidge Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship in Astrophysics in 2021 in honor of Professor Margaret Burbidge for her field-defining research. The goal is to establish a distinguished postdoctoral fellowship program for the Department to identify, recruit and support outstanding young astrophysicists at an early stage of their careers. This initiative was made possible through the generosity of The Brinson Foundation.
Prof. E. Margaret Burbidge
E. Margaret Burbidge began her research career at Yerkes Observatory in 1951, having been encouraged by O. Struve and S. Chandrasekhar to accept a research fellowship from the International Astronomical Union. She thrived in this new environment which fostered making connections between physics and astronomy. She was inspired by a pivotal conference at Yerkes in 1952 organized by Maria Mayer and Harold Urey on the abundance of the elements at the time she was analyzing spectra of B stars using spectrographs at Yerkes and at McDonald Observatory. Subsequently she pursued abundance anomalies in stars and began to work on chemical evolution in galaxies and on the origin of the elements. After her ground-breaking paper on stellar nucleosynthesis with Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle, in 1957 she returned to The University of Chicago as a Shirley Farr Fellow and measured galaxy rotation curves at McDonald Observatory. In 1962 she accepted a professorship at the University of California at San Diego where she spent the rest of her career (except for 1972 - 1973 when she was Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory). She was elected president of the American Astronomical Society 1976 - 1978 and president for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1983. In 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Margaret Burbidge's research concerned the chemical evolution of galaxies and she synthesized a number of astrophysical fields: nucleosynthesis in the cores of stars; abundance patterns in both stars and the ionized interstellar medium; mixing of gas in both quiet and violent galactic environments; the physical connection between small scales (nuclei and star-forming regions) and large scales in galaxies; and the relationship between galaxies and their environment. As one path to understanding the connection between stellar populations and the structures of their host galaxies, she measured dynamical masses and mass-to-light ratios for a wide range of galaxy types. High-velocity gas in some sources suggested out-of-equilibrium conditions, a line of research that put her at the forefront of interpreting the emission and absorption spectra of quasi-stellar objects immediately after their recognition in 1963.
Current Fellows
Michael Zhang
Inaugural Fellow
Michael Zhang, finishing PhD at Caltech, who also has a 51 Pegasi b Fellowship from the Heising-Simon’s Foundation. Michael Zhang studies exoplanet atmospheres. His two current projects are probing photoevaporation from young mini Neptunes by looking for escaping hydrogen and helium, and measuring the atmospheric composition of rocky planets with JWST. In a previous life, Zhang was a software engineer at Microsoft. Outside of science, he is a Roman history buff, an international relations enthusiast, and a foodie who also loves trying exotic cuisines.
Daniele Rogantini
Daniele Rogantini is an X-ray astronomer. He uses high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy to study accretion disc winds, outflows, and emitting plasmas in AGN, X-ray binaries and transients (e.g. GRBs, TDEs). During his PhD, he built new X-ray extinction models based on laboratory measurements to probe the properties of cosmic dust and ISM. Daniele is a member of the XRISM Science Team. He will use his recently developed time-dependent photoionisation model to constrain the impact of AGN winds on their host galaxies. Besides X-rays, Daniele loves exploring the world vertically, climbing (rock, ice, plastic) walls and getting lost in high mountains. He recently got his scuba diving certificate.