Kazunori Akiyama

Kazunori Akiyama, a Jansky Fellow of National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at MIT Haystack Observatory, has received the 2020 Young Astronomer Award from the Astronomical Society of Japan (ASJ). Akiyama will receive a medal, plaque, and $1,000 prize for his significant contributions to the first-ever images of a black hole taken with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

The awards program, established in 1988 via donations from members of the ASJ society, annually recognizes up to three early-career scientists who are under 35 years of age and who have made outstanding contributions to astronomy in the past five years. This year, Akiyama shares the prize with two other awardees.

In 2010, as a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Akiyama joined an international project later named the Event Horizon Telescope. He made significant contributions to early EHT observational experiments in the early 2010s, including those of the supermassive black hole M87— images of which were finally captured and published in 2019. His PhD work won the President Award and the Research Award of the University of Tokyo in 2015.

Akiyama has been working at Haystack Observatory, a radio science research center in Westford, Massachusetts, as a postdoc of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science since 2015 and as a NRAO Jansky Fellow since 2017. Akiyama developed new imaging techniques and a software package named SMILI, one of the three software packages used to create the first images of M87.