Sarah Peacock is the 2020 recipient of the Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award, the department's highest award for graduate student scholarship. Sarah defended her dissertation, Predicting the Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation Environment Around Low-Mass Stars, on November 22, 2019; Professor Travis Barman served as her advisor.
Sarah's research interests include studies of stellar upper atmospheres and ultraviolet emission from low mass stars. She uses the PHOENIX atmosphere code to compute synthetic stellar spectra for exoplanet host stars that span extreme ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. Sarah is a science team member for the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS).
This summer (2020), Sarah will begin an appointment as a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
The citation for the Kuiper Award reads: "This award is presented to students of the planetary sciences who best exemplify, through the high quality of their researches 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."