The David Will Prize recognizes a student or postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics who is conducting an exceptional research program in computational astronomy, survey astronomy, data science, or other related topics. The award honors the contribution of David Will, who for many years was a beloved member of the department staff, leading the department’s computing and IT efforts. David had a physics background, a generous spirit, was critical to the establishment of ASAS-SN and many other efforts. David was also a dear friend to many people in the department for many years. 

This year, we award the David Will Prize to postdoctoral fellow Michael Tucker in recognition of his leadership in two data intensive projects. The first is with the ASASSN low surface brightness project, Michael built the machinery to construct stacked images from millions of images with ASASSN's 20 cameras to obtain the median surface brightness sensitivity of 26.1 mag/arcsec^2 off the Galactic plane. The second project is the Spectroscopic Classification of Astronomical Transients (SCAT) survey, for which Michael is co-PI and is responsible for the data reduction pipeline for spectra to classify a large variety of astrophysical transients, a task that is especially important as Rubin begins observations.