A good start in 2023
Astrophysicist Prof. Dr. Tim Dietrich receives IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in General Relativity and Gravitation and a scholarship from the Daimler and Benz Foundation
Tim Dietrich, assistant professor at the University of Potsdam and Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, has been honored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) as the best young scientist in the field of general relativity and gravitation. Dietrich receives this prize for his fundamental contributions to the development of binary neutron star models and the understanding of extremely dense nuclear matter. The award comes with a prize money of 1,000 euros and a medal.
Shortly before, Dietrich obtained a grant of 40,000 euros from the Daimler and Benz Foundation for his research. The foundation awards grants to outstanding postdocs, non-permanent professors and group leaders with the aim of strengthening the autonomy and creativity of the next generation of scientists. The funding will support Dietrich and his team to deepen their interdisciplinary research in the areas of nuclear physics, general relativity, gravitational-wave astronomy, and multi-messenger astronomy, and to expand their research network. In their project NUMANJI (Nuclear Physics and Multi-messenger Astronomy through Joint bayesian Inference) they use Bayesian analysis tools to analyze multi-messenger and nuclear physics data. They are especially interested in gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signals emitted by coalescing neutron stars.
To make the good start into 2023 complete, in February Dietrich was selected Germany's third best young scientist in the “Young Scientist of the Year 2022” competition by academics.
Tim Dietrich studied physics at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he also earned his doctorate in 2016. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam and a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics in Amsterdam. Since February 2020, Dietrich is an assistant professor for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Potsdam and since July 2021 Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Dietrich has already won several prizes, including awards for his dissertation from the German Physical Society and from the University of Jena, the Heinz Billing Prize for the Advancement of Scientific Computing, and last year's Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize. He received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant worth 1.5 million Euros for his research project “SMArt” (“From Subatomic to Cosmic Scales: Simulating, Modelling, and Analyzing Binary Neutron Star Mergers”).
