Kovalevskaja Award 2010 for Joseph Hennawi

Joseph Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg is a recipient of the 2010 Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, one of the most valuable and prestigious academic prizes in Germany. He receives 1.45 million Euro. The award is administered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, with the goal of attracting top-flight junior research talent from abroad to pursue high-profile research projects at German institutions.

Dr. Hennawi is research group leader at MPIA, and will spend the tenure of his Kovalevskaja award working in the "Galaxies and Cosmology" department (director: Prof. Dr. Hans-Walter Rix). The focus of Hennawi's research is the nature of intergalactic gas, which provides fundamental information about the evolution of the Universe and clues to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets.