University of Arizona Regents Professor Marcia Rieke has won a $500,000 science prize for her work on the James Webb Space Telescope and other contributions to astronomy.
The nonprofit Gruber Foundation selected Rieke for its 2024 Cosmology Prize for “pioneering work on astronomical instrumentation.”
Rieke heads up the team that built and successfully deployed the Webb telescope’s main set of infrared eyes. The Near InfraRed Camera, or NIRCam, is now being used to peer farther than ever before, revealing tantalizing new details about the universe’s earliest galaxies.
Some of that work is being done by another team led by Rieke called JADES, short for JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.
She also played a leading role in the development of NIRCam’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.
“Through these substantive contributions along with earlier work, Marcia Rieke has had a lasting impact on our understanding of the universe,” wrote the Gruber Foundation in a citation last week, when it announced this year’s winner.
Since 2000, the foundation based at Yale University has honored a leading cosmologist, astronomer, astrophysicist or scientific philosopher for theoretical, analytical, conceptual or observational discoveries about the cosmos.
Rieke is scheduled to collect her prize, along with a gold laureate pin, on Aug. 8 during the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Cape Town, South Africa.
Rieke joined the U of A faculty in 1975 and has devoted much of her career to infrared astronomy.
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and now holds the Dr. Elizabeth Roemer Endowed Chair at Steward Observatory.
U of A President Robert C. Robbins described her as “a true faculty superstar.”
Steward director and Astronomy Department head Buell Jannuzi called her “one of the most accomplished and generous scientists I know.”
In a written statement, Rieke said she was stunned by the prize and thankful to her fellow Webb telescope team members who made it possible.
“Without them, I would never have had the opportunity to make so many discoveries,” Rieke said. “And I think that the greatest discoveries from JWST are yet to be made.”
She and her research colleagues should figure prominently in those future discoveries.
In her role as principal investigator for Webb’s main infrared camera, Rieke is guaranteed a whopping 900 hours of observation time using the space telescope.
