Alice Shapley and Tommaso Treu, UCLA professors of physics and astronomy, have been elected 2021 fellows of the American Physical Society, a nonprofit that advances the knowledge of physics. The organization represents more than 55,000 members worldwide, including physicists at universities, national laboratories and industry.
Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the society’s membership is recognized with the honor.
Shapley, UCLA’s vice chair for astronomy and astrophysics, was praised by the society for “outstanding contributions to the study of key processes in galaxy formation and evolution based on the rest-ultraviolet and rest-optical spectra of distant galaxies observed during the epoch of peak star formation in the universe.”
Shapley, who was selected as a UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer for 2021–22, earned her doctorate in astronomy from Caltech. Her research expertise includes galaxy formation and evolution, and stellar populations and chemical evolution at high redshift.
Treu was praised by the organization for “leading contributions to a precise determination of the expansion rate of the universe and the understanding of dark matter based on observations of gravitationally-lensed systems, and to the studies of cosmic reionization and the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes.”
His research expertise includes galaxy formation and evolution, gravitational lensing, dark matter in galaxies and black holes. He earned his doctorate in physics at Italy’s Scuola Normale Superiore. His previous honors include the American Astronomical Society’s Newton Lacy Pierce Prize.
