August 27, 2024
Congratulations to Anirudh (Ani) Chiti, who has been named a Brinson Prize Fellow at the University of Chicago in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. Established in 2021, the Brinson Prize Fellowship Program supports ambitious research in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology, with a focus on projects that complement and capitalize on the latest space science.
Ani Chiti studies how the earliest stars and galaxies evolved in the first billion years of the universe. He performs this research by identifying, mapping, and investigating the chemical composition of nearby ancient stars and galaxies in an approach known as Galactic Archaeology. In his PhD work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chiti developed imaging analyses that led to an order-of-magnitude increase in the efficiency of identifying the most ancient stars. This enabled several pioneering studies, including providing the first direct evidence that the first galaxies formed in massive, extended distributions of an enigmatic substance known as dark matter.
As a Brinson Prize Fellow at KICP, Chiti is scaling these analysis techniques for the next generation of digital sky surveys to build an unprecedented view of the ancient Milky Way, in addition to immediate projects that will unveil the interplay between dark matter, the first supernovae, and the earliest galaxy mergers in shaping the first galaxies.
The Brinson Prize Fellowship Program, a collaboration between The Brinson Foundation and the Space Telescope Science Institute, offers fellows up to three years of support for research, which may also be used to support unique professional development opportunities, such as science communication training. Brinson Prize Fellows are hosted at 11 participating institutions.