Yale Professor Priyamvada Natarajan Wins 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics

Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan has won the prestigious 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics for her “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of dark matter substructure in galaxy clusters, the formation and fueling of black holes, and their feedback into the surrounding environment.” The prize, which comes with a $10,000 award, was announced Jan. 16 at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. It is awarded jointly by the AAS and the American Institute of Physics (AIP). 

Natarajan is the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and chair of Astronomy and professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). In a statement she said she’s “delighted and deeply honored to be recognized by the AAS and AIP.” She has “had the great fortune to be working at the frontier of astronomy and astrophysics research at this very special time, when it has been possible to put my conceptual and theoretical ideas to the test swiftly, against abundantly available data,” she said. “Never before has the gap between proposing and validating ideas been this short in science — I feel so lucky to be a scientist engaged in research now,” she said.

Natarajan’s :seminal contributions involve the development of novel theoretical ideas and methods that permit direct comparison to observational data to answer fundamental open questions in theoretical astrophysics,” a Yale press release said. The theoretical astrophysicist interested in cosmology, gravitational lensing and black hole physics. Her research interests in black hole physics are focused on the formation, fueling, and feedback from supermassive black holes over cosmic time.

A  Yale faculty member since 2000, Natarajan is director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, which fosters communication, mutual understanding, collaborative research, and teaching among diverse scientific and humanistic disciplines. 

She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.. She also is the recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Liberty Science Center’s Genius Award.

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Last year, she was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In a profile on Natarajan, Shep Doeleman, astrophysicist and the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope, wrote how in November 2023, written “a novel approach developed years ago” by her, brought astronomers  “closer to under­standing how supermassive black holes that lurk at the centers of most galaxies are formed,” It was a theory she had speculated, which was corroborated by “the piercing gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Doeleman wrote. She has “a knack for pursuing the most creative research, and as a fellow astronomer, I am always inspired by her work,” he said. “Her latest result takes us one step closer to understanding our cosmic beginnings.”

(Top photo by Michael S. Helfenbein)