Dingshan Deng began his graduate career in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic when travel restrictions delayed his arrival in the U.S. He attended his first semester remotely from China. When a class was scheduled for 9:00a.m. in Tucson, Dingshan was participating at midnight local time. Despite this, he earned top grades in all of his courses and will be graduating with a 4.0 GPA.

For his Ph.D. thesis, Dingshan undertook a challenging but important project: determining the mass of planet-forming disks which various groups have studied, often arriving at puzzling conclusions. Dingshan dived into understanding the reasons behind these conclusions and developed an independent code (DiskMINT) that uses a self-consistent disk structure and a reduced chemical network optimized for CO and its isotopologues, coupled with proper continuum and line radiative transfer. Aiming for transparency and to aid in reconciling discrepancies among various research groups, Dingshan made DiskMINT available to the wider community.

He demonstrated that reported disk depletions are not required to explain the data. Dingshan took the lead role in reducing and analyzing for 100 hours of disk observations, which was a complex and time intensive task. He quickly became the go-to person within the team, and thanks to his dedication and careful work, the collaboration substantially increased the number of CO isotopologue detections.

Building on the code he developed, Dingshan has run an extensive grid of more than 100 disk models (the DiskMINT-GARDEN), spanning key disk parameters that affect CO and its isotopologue emission. With more than one hundred disks that already have archival or approved deep CO observations, DiskMINT-GARDEN will enable to quantify what fraction of disks remain capable of forming giant planets as a function of time, and to characterize how the gas surface density evolves.

Dingshan’s academic and research achievements have been exceptional. He has solved a major problem in the field and provided the community with tools to robustly assess fundamental disk properties. Dingshan is also mentoring two undergraduate students. He plans to defend his Ph.D. this summer.

The Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award is presented to students who best exemplify, through the high quality of their research and the excellence of their scholastic achievements, the goals and standards established and maintained by Gerard P. Kuiper, founder of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. To support students with the Kuiper Award, visit the University of Arizona Foundation.

Previous Kuiper Award Recipients