A&A announces 2026 Awards for outstanding early-career researchers
- Details
- Published on 22 April 2026
On 20 April 2026, the Board of Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) finalised its selection for this year’s A&A Awards, recognising exceptional work by early-career researchers in the field.
A&A Award for Outstanding PhD Article 2026
Dr. Tommy Chi Ho Lau, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, GERMANY
The A&A Awards Committee is pleased to recommend Dr. Tommy Chi Ho Lau as a recipient of the Astronomy & Astrophysics Award for Outstanding PhD Article for his paper "Rapid formation of massive planetary cores in a pressure bump" (A&A 668, A170, 2022). Understanding how microscopic dust grains grow into planetary cores remains a great challenge, and the different stages of this process have traditionally been modeled in isolation. Dr. Lau built the first framework to connect all stages in a single self-consistent simulation, from sub-micron dust grains to Earth-mass cores. The key insight is that a pressure bump, where gas pressure is locally enhanced and solids naturally accumulate, simultaneously solves several long-standing problems: it concentrates material to form planetesimals, accelerates their growth, and prevents the resulting cores from migrating inward. Massive cores assemble in roughly 100,000 years, even far from the star, well within observed disk lifetimes. The Committee unanimously selected this article for the 2026 A&A Award.
Read his award-winning paper here.
A&A Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher Article 2026
Dr. Kasper E. Heintz, DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark, DENMARK
The A&A Awards Committee is pleased to recommend Dr. Kasper E. Heintz as a recipient of the Astronomy & Astrophysics Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher Article for his paper "The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey" (A&A 693, A60, 2025). Using nearly 600 galaxies observed with the James Webb Space Telescope within the first billion years of cosmic history, Dr Heintz built the largest uniform spectroscopic census of reionisation-era galaxies to date. Through a new diagnostic, the Lyman-alpha damping parameter, the study reveals that the vast majority of galaxies at the highest redshifts are shrouded in massive reservoirs of pristine neutral hydrogen, providing the most direct evidence that we are witnessing galaxies assembling their baryonic matter for the first time. The work further constrains the timeline of cosmic reionization and delivers a major community legacy through its public release of uniformly processed spectra and catalogs. The Committee unanimously selected this article for the 2026 A&A Award.
Read his award-winning paper here.
A&A received a particularly high number of applications for the 2026 A&A Awards. We thank the community for this strong response and for the trust early-career researchers place in A&A by choosing to publish their work in it.
The Awards will be presented during the European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting 2026, to be held from 29 June to 3 July 2026 at the SWISSTECH Convention Centre in Lausanne.