2024 STAR, IMPACT Awards Honor 3 Cottrell Scholars
Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named three exemplary Cottrell Scholars as recipients of its 2024 STAR and IMPACT Awards. CS 1997 Mark Moldwin, Physics, University of Michigan, has won the STAR award, and CS 2009 Maura McLaughlin, Physics, West Virginia University, and CS 2009 Rory Waterman, Chemistry, University of Vermont, have won IMPACT awards.
“Excellence in teaching, research, and leadership is just the beginning for these members of the Cottrell Scholar community,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “As their careers have advanced, they have made important contributions far beyond their own disciplines and institutions.”
The STAR (Science Teaching And Research) Award recognizes outstanding research and educational accomplishments, while the IMPACT Award recognizes the work of a Cottrell Scholar or Holland Award recipient who has had a national impact in science through leadership and service. Both STAR and IMPACT awards include a $5,000 cash prize.
The awards will be presented at the 2024 Cottrell Scholar Conference, to be held July 17-19, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona. Recipients will give brief acceptance talks and will be available throughout the coming year to provide mentoring to their early career Cottrell Scholar colleagues, according to RCSA Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco.
STAR and IMPACT Award nominees must be a Cottrell Scholar at least 12 years beyond the year of their award, or a Holland Awardee regardless of the year of their award. They must also hold an academic position at a research university or primarily undergraduate institution in the United States or Canada.
STAR Award recipient Mark Moldwin is recognized for research that has revolutionized space-based magnetometry as well as his work in developing educational courses, materials, and textbooks in the emerging field of space weather, which focuses on understanding how energy, mass, and momentum from the Sun affect the Earth’s space and ground technological systems and society. In the last few years, Moldwin has been selected for three NASA magnetometer satellite projects. A consistently top-rated teacher, he has advocated for inclusive, accessible and equitable STEM education and, more recently, for increased attention to student mental health. He has served on advisory committees for organizations such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Academies, and conducted workshops for students and early career scientists in China, Chile, Ethiopia, Norway, Malaysia, Zambia, and South Africa as part of the United Nations’ International Space Weather Initiative. He was a member of the American Geophysical Union Ethics Task Force that in 2016 helped codify an Ethics Policy recognizing that harm done by harassment, bullying, and discrimination is just as damaging to the community as the traditional ethical violations of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification. Moldwin is currently co-chairing the NAS Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey State of the Profession Panel that is advocating for systemic change in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within space physics and the broader research community.
IMPACT Award winner Maura McLaughlin is an international leader in astrophysics working to build pipelines for high-school students to STEM majors and careers. She founded and co-directs the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Wave Astrophysics (NANOGrav), an international collaboration engaging some 50 senior investigators from across 30 institutions in the use of millisecond pulsars to serve as a timing array for the detection of low frequency gravitational waves. Their recent discovery of the first evidence for a stochastic background of low-frequency gravitational waves received significant attention from both the press and the broader astronomical community. McLaughlin collaborated with colleagues at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to establish the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, a program to engage middle and high school students and their teachers in hands-on data analysis to identify new pulsars. Through the program, more than 2,000 students in 18 states have not just “played the part” of astronomers but have discovered seven pulsars. She served on the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey Panel charting the 10-year program of research priorities in Astronomy and currently chairs the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) for DSA-2000, an array of 2000 5-meter radio dishes planned to be built in the Nevada desert. She is co-Laureate of the 2023 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts.
IMPACT Award winner Rory Waterman is a leader in organometallic catalysis and main group chemistry whose efforts to implement systemic change in science and science education exemplify the Cottrell Scholar community’s values of teaching and service. In 2011, he co-founded the RCSA Cottrell Scholar Collaborative New Faculty Workshop for new chemistry faculty, which is now administered by the American Chemical Society. The workshops have grown in scope and capacity, helping more than 700 faculty members understand more effective teaching, mentoring, and inclusive science. The workshop model is now being replicated by Fulbright-Cottrell Scholars in Germany. He has been a leader in the implementation and dissemination of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs), organizing the first workshop for the physical sciences, which brought together education researchers, educators, campus and national leaders, and representatives from funding agencies to discuss effective practices in development, implementation, and assessment. This led to publication of Expanding the CURE Model: Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (co-edited by Waterman and published by RCSA) which is distributed free of cost and has formed the basis of subsequent workshops. He has ushered dozens of science teachers through the University of Vermont’s Masters of Arts in Teaching program in a transition from a career in STEM to science teaching, and he is active on scientific journal editorial boards and in organizing scientific symposia at national meetings and regional conferences.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement is a private foundation that funds basic research in the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, physics, and related fields) at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. It creates and supports inclusive communities of early career researchers through two core programs, the Cottrell Scholar Program and Scialog, as well as its newly launched RCSA Fellows initiative.
