2020-Jan-11: The VERITAS Collaboration is pleased to recognize the recipients of the 2019  "Outstanding Contribution Awards". Each year the collaboration recognizes exceptional work by two individuals - a graduate student (the Simon Swordy Outstanding Contribution Award) and a postdoctoral researcher (the Trevor Weekes Outstanding Contribution Award), to "...formally recognize the significant contributions of more early-career members of the collaboration in the critical service work that enables scientific publications of VERITAS, but do not result in any scientific publications directly".

This year's recipients are:

Alasdair Gent (Simon Swordy Award) - Awarded for Alasdair's role in ACG/VEGAS and simulations production: "...managing production of simulations on the Open Science Grid (OSG) is his biggest contribution to VERITAS. While it seems like a trivial task, managing several million jobs and data files is not... Alasdair stepped forward and volunteered."

Dr. Greg Richards (Trevor Weekes Award) - Awarded for his role as calibration "czar": "He has been serving as Calibration Czar since April 2016, a role which includes scheduling and coordinating all of the regular calibration measurements for VERITAS, providing instruction to the observers, as well as following up on the subsequent analysis, and maintaining the associated wiki pages. In addition, after serving as a TAC member for a year, Greg took on the role of TAC Chair in summer 2018. This is a service-heavy role which is usually given to a more senior member of the collaboration - not a first-year post-doc!"

Congratulations to Alasdair and Greg!

Alasdair Gent    Dr. Greg Richards