Astronomy Student Wins $20,000 Mitchell Student Grand Prize Award for Academic Excellence

George Miller, astronomy senior and Dean’s Scholar in the College of Natural Sciences, has won the $20,000 grand prize in the University Co-operative Society’s George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence.

AUSTIN, Texas — George Miller, astronomy senior and Dean’s Scholar in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the $20,000 grand prize in the University Co-operative Society’s George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence.

Seth Whitsitt, physics senior, won a second prize and received $5,000.

Winners of the 13^th annual undergraduate student awards were announced May 2.

The awards celebrate University of Texas at Austin students with exemplary academic records who have made an extraordinary contribution to their fields of study through a research project, literary work, musical composition, humanitarian project or similar undertaking.

Miller was nominated by Don Winget, the Harlan J. Smith Centennial Professor in Astronomy, for his thesis, "The Discovery of Two Planets Orbiting the Post-Common Envelope Eclipsing Binary NN Serpentis." Miller graduates this month and will begin work on a Ph.D. at Harvard University in the fall. He is also a member of the university’s Plan II Honors program.

Winget said that Miller stood out from the beginning among an extraordinary group of Dean's Scholars and high achievers selected for the astronomy stream. As a freshman, he went to the McDonald Observatory and learned how to take his own data on the Otto Struve telescope and to analyze and interpret the data. This spring, Miller became the local expert on the robotic MONET telescope. Several groups of teachers have started using MONET under Miller’s tutelage.

Miller led participation with a research group from the University of Goettingen in an exciting new series of observations on NN Serpentis, a close binary star with circumbinary planets. The discoveries of these long-period planets were the first of their kind and demonstrated that the process of planet formation is far more forgiving than previously realized.

Whitsitt received the prize for his thesis, “Exact Chiral Spin Liquid and Mean-Field Perturbations of Gamma Matrix Models on the Ruby Lattice.” The project involved studying a special type of quantum spin system, and the research has implications in a wide range of physical systems, including some that may end up in next-generation technologies.

Whitsitt graduates this month and will begin his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the fall.

For more information contact: Lee Clippard, 512-232-0675, clippard@austin.utexas.edu

Photo by Kara Matthews.