Every year, OSU astronomy graduate students publish about 20 first author papers. The department awards the Ann S. Tuttle Paper Prize to one outstanding graduate student-led paper published during the preceding year, in this case 2024. This award was endowed by the estate of Ann Tuttle. Ms. Tuttle set up the fund to show her appreciation for the kindness shown her by Ann and Gerald Newsom, long time professor and former chair of the department. 

 

This year, we award the Ann S. Tuttle Graduate Student Paper Prize to Wynne Turner for her paper, "New measurements of the Lyman-α forest continuum and effective optical depth with LyCAN and DESI Y1 data". This paper opened up a fundamentally new way that we analyze Lyman alpha forest data for large spectroscopic surveys with a sophisticated machine learning (convolutional neural network) tool that predicts the quasar continuum in the Ly-alpha forest region. This approach can measure quantities that cannot be measured with the traditional approach for LyA analysis and can measure other quantities with potentially quite different systematics, like the evolution of the mean optical depth, the full shape of the correlation function, and the 1D power spectrum on the largest scales. The paper has been cited 16 times to date, and there are many follow-up projects led by others in DESI based on Wynne's results.