The astronomy department is proud to announce its Spring 2025 Academic Awards. The winners were recognized in an online ceremony on May 2nd, 2025. The ceremony was led by Department Chair Tony Wong and Director of Undergraduate Studies Professor Bryan Dunne and featured remarks from longtime donors, the winning students, and the students' advisors.
"We are fortunate that our donor families are so enthusiastic about meeting with the student award winners," said Prof. Wong. "This represents a unique opportunity to connect our outstanding students with the history and legacy of the Astronomy Department. It's also a great way for the donors to hear about the research being done in the department, since so much of that research is being driven by our students."
The following individuals were recognized with the following awards.
Lewis E. Snyder Memorial Travel Award
The Lewis E. Snyder Graduate Student Travel Award provides graduate students with the opportunity to present their work at conferences, highlighting their astronomical research at Illinois and providing exposure to the wider research community.
Seon Woo Kim - Fall 2024
Seon Woo Kim is a third-year graduate student in Astronomy, working with Professors Kirk Barrow and Joaquin Vieira. She attended the meeting "Escape of Lyman radiation from galactic labyrinths" on the island of Crete in April 2025. She presented research that was conducted while a visiting scholar at NASA/GSFC in 2022 and has continued in parallel to her thesis work.
Erica Messmer - Spring 2025
Erica Messmer is a third-year graduate student in astronomy who is working with Professor Brian Fields. She will attend the Kavli Summer Program in June 2025 at the University of Virginia, which focuses on cosmic dust. This summer program is designed to connect graduate students with a professor to work on a shorter-term project related to the field. There is a presentation of the work at the end of the program.
Qiaoya Wu - Spring 2025
Qiaoya Wu is a fourth-year graduate student in Astronomy, working with Professor Yue Shen. She attended the meeting "Unveiling a Universe of Black Holes: The Next Generation of AGN Surveys" in Munich, Germany in March 2025. Qiaoya presented a talk describing results from her recently published paper, "Understanding the Broad-line Region of Active Galactic Nuclei with Photoionization. I. The Moderate-accretion Regime"
Mr. and Mrs. Hsiang-pai and Wen-hua Chu Department Of Astronomy Excellence in Research Graduate Student Award
This graduate student award, honoring the parents of Professor Emerita You-Hua Chu, has been established to encourage young scientists to achieve excellence in research.
Alex Green
Alex Green is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Astronomy. He is studying the connections between the molecular gas and star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy and satellite of the Milky Way. He primarily conducts studies using observations from the ALMA millimeter/submillimeter interferometer. Using the Green Bank Telescope, he has observed the molecular gas in nearby galaxies for the GBT-EDGE survey. Dr. Tony Wong advises him.
Qiaoya Wu
Qiaoya Wu is a fourth-year Ph.D. student working with Prof. Yue Shen. Before joining UIUC, she received her B.Sc. in Astronomy from Xiamen University. Her research focuses on understanding the environments around AGNs through large-scale quasar spectroscopic surveys and advanced photoionization modeling. She has worked extensively with major sky surveys such as SDSS and DESI and observational data from HST and JWST to study the physical conditions of the line-emitting gas near SMBHs. In addition to observational analysis, she develops physically motivated theoretical models to connect emission-line properties with black hole accretion physics. Qiaoya is passionate about building a unified framework for interpreting AGN line-emitting structures.
Layla Suzanne Ryan Scholarship Fund
The Layla Suzanne Ryan award recognizes the efforts of a young astronomer who shares their passion, experience, and knowledge of Astronomy with peers, faculty and the public through community outreach.
Zoe Surles
Zoe Surles is an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign majoring in Astronomy + Data Science, with a minor in Informatics. Zoe currently serves as the Technical Manager for the Illinois Space Society's NASA Micro-g NExT Team and as the Operations Manager for the Astronomical Society at UIUC. After graduation, Zoe plans to pursue a career at the intersection of data science, astronomy, and space technology, while continuing to stay actively involved in STEM outreach.
Stanley Wyatt Memorial Award
The Stanley Wyatt Memorial Award is given to a graduating Astronomy major or minor, with the most outstanding GPA, and track record of research.
Susan Byrom
Susan Byrom is a graduating senior from the UIUC Department of Astronomy. Susan will be graduating this May with a dual degree in Astronomy and Engineering Physics, with a minor in Computer Science. In the past year, she has worked with Dr. Kirk Barrow, developing synthetic stellar population spectra that have been used by other members of Dr. Barrow's research group. Susan has been admitted to the Astronomy PhD program at the University of Florida, and will continue to work in computational and theoretical astrophysics there.