Prize Recipient

Floor Broekgaarden
Columbia University

"For foundational and groundbreaking studies of the formation and evolution of gravitational wave source populations using state-of-the-art population synthesis models that explore for the first time a broad range of stellar, binary, and cosmic evolution paths."

Floor Broekgaarden received a double BSc. degree in physics & astronomy, and mathematics in 2017 from the University of Amsterdam as well as a MSc. degree in 2018 from the Anton Pannekoek Institute at the University of Amsterdam. Floor obtained her PhD in astrophysics from Harvard University at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in 2023, during which she held a NASA FINESST fellowship and was a Harvard Horizons Scholar. Floor is currently a Junior Fellow in the Simons Society of Fellows hosted in New York at Columbia University and the Simons Foundation, as well as a research assistant-professor in the William H. Miller III Department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. Floor’s research focuses on “gravitational-wave paleontology”: using the collisions of black holes and neutron stars observed with gravitational waves as fossils to probe the formation, lives, and explosive deaths of massive stars across cosmic time, for which Floor is part of the “COMPAS” stellar evolution collaboration as well as the “AstroAI” collaboration.