Prof. David Schlegel of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the PI of the BOSS part of SDSS-III and a long time contributor to all areas of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys was announced yesterday as one of the winners of the E.O. Lawrence Award.

David Schelegel, PI of BOSS, shows off a plug plate. Image credit: LBL

The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of Ernest Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron (for which he won 1939 Nobel Laureate in physics). The Lawrence Award honors U.S. scientists and engineers, at mid-career, for exceptional contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States.

The citation for David’s award (for the High Energy Physics Category of the award) reads:

Honored for his exceptional leadership of major projects making the largest two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps of the universe, which have been used to map the expansion rate of the Universe to 10 billion light years and beyond. His fundamental technical contributions to high precision measurements of the expansion history of the Universe, and his massive galaxy redshift surveys to detect baryon acoustic oscillations, has helped ascertain the nature of Dark Energy, test General Relativity, and positively impact fundamental understanding of matter and energy in the universe.  These efforts have made precision cosmology one of the most important new tools of high-energy physics.

All of us at SDSS are delighted to wish David Schlegel many congratulations for this honor.