The annual award supported by the L’Oréal foundation, the UNESCO and the French Academy of Sciences recognises PhD students and postdoctoral researchers for the excellence of their work and their commitment to sharing their passion. This year, Kirsty Feijen was selected as one of the 35 winners selected from over 800 applications.

Kirsty is a postdoctoral researcher in H.E.S.S. at the High-Energy Astrophysics Group in the Astroparticle and Cosmology laboratory (APC) in Paris. She specialises in extreme environments in our Galaxy, created by the violent deaths of stars, such as supernova remnants. Using H.E.S.S. data, she analyses various unidentified Galactic gamma-ray sources to understand their origin, for example the recent discovery of a pulsar wind nebula in the Vela Junior region.

Kirsty is also a key member of the Gammapy development team, an open-source software which enables astronomers worldwide to combine data from telescopes that were previously incompatible.

We warmly congratulate Kirsty on this achievement and on winning the award!