Submitted by Eleni Soumpourou on Mon, 07/09/2026 - 14:11
We are pleased to announce that KICC member, and Herchel Smith Fellow, Floor Van Donkelaar has been awarded the Edith Alice Müller Award 2026 by the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy (SSAA), recognising the outstanding quality and significance of her doctoral research.
The award celebrates exceptional PhD theses in astronomy and astrophysics. This year, Floor Van Donkelaar is recognised alongside Casper Farret Jentink, whose thesis focuses on the development of a high-resolution near-infrared spectrograph for studying exoplanetary atmospheres.
Floor’s award-winning thesis, “Disc Galaxies and Their Components at High Redshift: Similarities and Contrasts with the Local Universe,” explores how disc galaxies formed and evolved in the early Universe and how their properties compare with galaxies in the local Universe.
Her research uses advanced cosmological simulations and comparisons with observations to investigate the physical processes that shape galaxies over cosmic time. Her work contributes to our understanding of how galaxies develop their structures and how the galaxies we observe today emerged from the conditions of the early Universe.
Many congratulations to Floor on this outstanding achievement.
