On February 20, 2025, Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) announced the award recipients in the first year of Scialog: Early Science with the LSST. The awards, formally known as Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards, were granted to eight cross-disciplinary teams of scientists, one of which includes CIERA Professors Allison Strom and Adam Miller. The new three-year initiative is designed to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
“Rubin and LSST will provide a treasure trove of cosmic explosions that require new approaches to understand,” said Prof. Strom. “The Scialog award allows me and my group to take one of our strengths—finding out what galaxies are made of—and apply it in this new setting to help learn about the lives and deaths of stars in those galaxies.”
Strom and Miller’s team, which also includes Prof. Ben Margalit from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Department of Physics and Astronomy, is titled Not So Heavy Metal: An Enhanced Rate of SLSNe at Cosmic Noon. With the RCSA Scialog funding, they will study super luminous supernovae (SLSNe) during Cosmic Noon, a period in cosmic history that began a few billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only a quarter of its current age. During this time, many galaxies were going through a growth spurt and forming stars quickly, making them an ideal environment to study these rare events. SLSNe, which were discovered in the last two decades, are 10 to 100 times more luminous than a normal massive stellar collapse supernova.
“The Scialog funding from RCSA provides an exciting new opportunity to move my research portfolio in a new direction to study the Universe around cosmic noon,” shared Prof. Miller. “I am greatly looking forward to this new collaboration.”
CIERA postdoctoral alum Maya Fishbach (currently at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto) also received a Scialog award, as a member of the team Multimessenger Transients in active galactic nuclei (AGN) Disks.
Scialog, which is short for “science + dialog” is a collaborative format created in 2010 by RCSA that aims to “accelerate breakthroughs by building a creative network of scientists that cross disciplinary silos, and by stimulating intensive conversation around a scientific theme of global importance.”
The Scialog awards are supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation, The Brinson Foundation, the Leinweber Foundation, and an independent philanthropist.