Yue Hu Commended for "Outstanding" Work on Magnetic Fields and Turbulence

Yue Hu, NASA Hubble Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, has been announced as one of the recipients of the 2025 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics. Hu received the award from the American Physical Society's Division of Astrophysics for his Ph.D. thesis, titled "The Cosmic Symphony: Magnetic Fields and Turbulence Across Clouds, Galaxies, to Galaxy Clusters." 

Hu's thesis research, conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Alex Lazarian, was praised for "radically" opening "new ways of exploring the properties of astrophysical turbulent magnetic fields and outstanding advancements in understanding the effects of magnetic accretion on supermassive black holes, molecular cloud evolution, star formation, and processes of cosmic ray propagation."

The award was established in 2013 by the Division of Astrophysics to recognize "outstanding" doctoral theses. In 2018, it was renamed for Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a pioneering British-American astronomer and astrophysicist who revolutionized knowledge of the chemical composition of stars.

Read more about the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics on the APS website.