The Markowitz Award is given to a graduate student who is conducting or developing a research program in areas of observational astronomy. The award is made possible by a generous gift from Ohio State doctoral alumnus Dr. Allan H. Markowitz (MS 1966, PhD 1969). 

 

This year, the department is very pleased to award the Markowitz Award to Dominick Rowan. 

 

Dom is the first author on eleven first-author papers, of which eight have been written as a graduate student at Ohio State, and he promises there’s another one using high contrast imaging coming on a month timescales. These are all grounded in observations, including work with large scale surveys like ASAS-SN and Gaia, TESS, his own PI PEPSI data, and now SharkVis and LBT imaging observations. 

 

Listing aside, Dom’s work is teaching us fundamental things about stars via studies of eclipsing binaries, and is pushing the boundaries of what we know about compact objects, some of the most fascinating objects in the Universe to both physicists and astronomers. He has been a pioneer in the combination of photometric variability with relatively sparse RV data, an approach that should expand to cover millions of stars within the next 5 years, and has also produced important measurements (which he then exploited) for more than 30,000 eclipsing binaries based out of ASAS-SN. 

 

For these accomplishments we are extremely happy to award Dom Rowan the 2024 Allan H. Markowitz Award.