McEnery and Thompson Share Lindsay Award

McEnery and Thompson Share Lindsay Award

Julie McEnery and Dave Thompson have been jointly awarded the 2010 John C. Lindsay Memorial Award for Space Science. This annual award is presented to a Goddard employee for an outstanding contribution to space science or technology. This is one of the Center's highest forms of recognition for a scientific contribution.

Julie and Dave are the Project Scientist and Deputy Project Scientist, respectively, for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the award is presented to them for the key roles they played in significant discoveries made with Fermi. Julie served as the Analysis Coordinator of the Large Area Telescope (LAT) during the first year of flight and was the LAT GRB onboard algorithm commissioner. Dave was the lead for the anti-coincidence detector on LAT, serves as the Multi-wavelength Coordinator, and was co-lead of the Catalog science group.

Fermi had 5 of the top cited papers in all of space science in 2009, and Julie was a leader on one of these papers (announcing extended high energy gamma-ray emission from GRB 080916C with a Lorentz factor > 600), and Dave was a leader of another (the publication of the LAT Bright Source Catalog).

Fermi is revolutionizing our view of the gamma-ray sky, and Julie and Dave have contributed significantly to the mission's scientific productivity.