Rice alum wins $1M Shaw Prize

Rice alumnus Gerald Fishman ’69 and an Italian colleague were awarded the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy at a banquet Wednesday in Hong Kong. The Shaw Prizes, which are awarded for astronomy, medicine and mathematics, are among the richest in all of science. Fishman, chief scientist at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Enrico Costa, director of research at the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Rome, won the 2011 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for their leadership of space missions that enabled the demonstration of the cosmological origin of gamma-ray bursts, the brightest sources known in the universe. Fishman has a Master of Science degree and a doctorate — both in space physics and astronomy — from Rice.

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