Brett Gladman to be awarded DPS Urey Prize

Dr. Brett J. Gladman is this year’s recipient of the Harold C. Urey
Prize. The Urey Prize is awarded annually by the Division for Planetary
Sciences (DPS), the largest division of the American Astronomical Society
(AAS). The Urey Prize was established by the DPS to recognize and
encourage outstanding achievements in planetary science by a young
scientist.

Gladman will receive the Urey Prize and associated cash award at special
ceremonies on Wednesday afternoon, October 9, 2002, in the Ballroom of the
Birmingham Jefferson Convention Center in Birmingham, Alabama, the site of
this year’s DPS Meeting. He will then address the DPS membership; the
title of his lecture is “Opening Pandora’s Box: The Discovery of New
Irregular Satellites of the Giant Planets.”

Gladman received a Master of Science in Physics and Astronomy from Queen’s
University in 1990, a Master of Science from Cornell University in 1992,
where he also received his PhD in astronomy and theoretical and applied
mechanics in 1996. He became an Henri Poincare Fellow at the Observatoire
de la Cote d’Azur in Nice, France, in 1996, then an NSERC fellow at the
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in 1997, and returned to
the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur in 1998 as a Chateaubriand
International fellow, joining the staff of the observatory as a CNRS
research astronomer in 1999. He recently became an associate professor
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Gladman is recognized for his studies of the dynamical structure of the
solar system; his extensive simulations of the orbital evolution of
meteorites from the Moon, Mars, and the main asteroid belt have
fundamentally altered our understanding of how these meteorites are
delivered to Earth. His observations using electronic cameras on large
telescopes to explore the outer solar system have led to the discovery of
eleven new moons of Saturn and five of Uranus, as well as several dozen
small bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Dr. Gladman has been the recipient of several prizes and honors, including
the designation of Minor Planet 7638 Gladman in 1999, the AAS Henri
Chretian International Collaborative Research Prize in 1998, and the
Eleanor York Prize for public service in astronomy by Cornell University
in 1996.