STScI Scientists, Engineers Part of Collaboration Receiving 2025 Berkeley Prize

Scientists and engineers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) have been awarded the 2025 Lancelot M. Berkeley-New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy as part of their work with the Astropy Project.

The Astropy Project is a community effort to develop a free and open-source core software package for astronomy using the Python programming language, as well as to foster interoperability between other Python astronomy packages. The extensive Astropy code library and affiliated packages provide a unified set of tools for astronomers to undertake tasks critical for research, such as coordinate transformations, reading and writing astronomical files, manipulating quantities with varied units, and modeling and visualizing data.

At the core of STScI's mission is to support the science community and the public in their endeavors to explore and understand the universe through advancing state-of-the-art astronomical research, archives, and tools for scientific discovery. STScI's substantial involvement in Astropy is a 'living' example of this. Not only does the code base provide underlying support for much of astronomy research as it is conducted today, but the Astropy support community fosters an inclusive environment in astronomical data analysis.

Since its inception in 2011, STScI has contributed significant institutional effort to the Astropy Collaboration at various levels, including leadership and infrastructure development.

In the prize citation, the AAS Vice Presidents praise Astropy as being "widely regarded as a load-bearing pillar of the global astronomical community, now forming foundational infrastructure across our field. For more than a decade, Astropy has enabled cosmic discovery across the breadth of astronomy, from supporting new students in astronomy to the operations of multibillion-dollar Great Observatories. The number of scientific results that Astropy has helped enable is truly uncountable."

The Astropy Collaboration consists of hundreds of volunteer contributors worldwide, and is managed by a group of 45 voting members, which includes a strong contingent of STScI staff members.

"The Astropy project is made possible only through the efforts of its community members - a group of users and developers that agree that sharing utilities is healthy for the community and the science it produces," said Erik Tollerud, associate astronomer and project scientist in the Data Science Mission Office at STScI and a founding coordinator for the Collaboration. "We're delighted to have this outlook affirmed and our efforts recognized by the Berkeley Prize."

Bestowed annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from The New York Community Trust, the Berkeley Prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting. The 245th AAS meeting will be held in National Harbor, Maryland, January 12-15, 2025.

The American Astronomical Society (AAS), established in 1899, is a major international organization of professional astronomers, astronomy educators, and amateur astronomers. Its membership of approximately 8,000 also includes physicists, geologists, engineers, and others whose interests lie within the broad spectrum of subjects now comprising the astronomical sciences. The mission of the AAS is to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community, which it achieves through publishing, meetings, science advocacy, education and outreach, and training and professional development.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

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