Fred Ciesla

Fred Ciesla, a DTM Carnegie Fellow from 2006 to 2008, has been awarded the 2011 Alfred O. Nier Prize by the Meteoritical Society.  The Society presents this award annually to an outstanding young scientist (under 35) who works on meteorites, impact craters, asteroids, or a related field.

Ciesla develops theoretical models to study the thermal, chemical, and dynamical evolution of materials in protoplanetary disks to understand the makeup of planetesimals and planets.  He compares the predictions of his models with measurements of meteoritic and planetary materials in order to constrain how the governing processes operated in our own protoplanetary disk, the solar nebula.  Ciesla also applies his models to investigate how extrasolar planets or protoplanetary disks developed their observed properties.  He continues to explore ways to bridge the fields of meteoritics and astrophysics.

Specific topics of Ciesla’s research involve the issues of whether chondrules could have formed in shock waves that passed through the solar nebula, how dust grains grow from sub-micron-sized particles to planets thousands of kilometers in diameter, how the dynamical evolution of a protoplanetary disk affects chemical evolution, and how primitive materials may have formed close to the Sun and then been transported outward large distances and incorporated into comets.

Ciesla is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.