Category: Science

Today, the Heising-Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the eight recipients of this year’s 51 Pegasi b Fellowships. These fellows are amongst the most promising and gifted researchers working in the field of planetary astronomy. Recipients will receive a research grant of up to $375,000 over three years to pursue innovative independent research ideas, take risks, and tackle challenging questions that will accelerate the field.

“Sleuthing for potentially brilliant research ideas to fund turns out to be a fun cultural shift after a decades-long lab career.” In its regular question-and-answer series with leaders in the world of physics, Physics Today, the magazine of the American Institute of Physics, spent time with Cyndi Atherton, program director for science at the Heising-Simons …

Among the thousands of scientists involved in the discovery of the merger of two neutron stars is a team led by astronomer Ryan Foley at UC Santa Cruz. With support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, Foley’s team captured the first images of the event in a galaxy 130 million light-years away utilizing the 1-meter Swope Telescope at the Carnegie Institution’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

Inside Philanthropy explores the “disturbing decline” of female physics and astronomy students who are on the path from students to professionals in those fields, and what the Heising-Simons Foundation is doing to try “to turn around some of these troubling stats in laboratories and academic departments.” The goal of the Foundation’s women in physics and …

The Heising-Simons Foundation’s Science program is committed to addressing gender imbalances and inequities in the fields of physics and astronomy, both in colleges and in academic and research careers in the United States.

One of our closest thought partners in this work has been UC Berkley’s Chancellor Emeritus and Silverman professor of physics Robert Birgeneau, who recently co-wrote a letter about this subject in the September 2017 Science magazine issue.

Explaining complex science concepts in simple and entertaining ways for a general audience can be a hard task, but theoretical physicist Henry Reich has carved out a special place in the YouTube-sphere doing exactly that. In its latest video, supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation’s Science program, MinutePhysics explains the surprising characteristics of “neutrino oscillations.”