Eva Laplace (final year PhD student at University of Amsterdam ) has been awarded the KNMW/ET outreach award for her software project TULIPS that allows to visualize computer simulations of the lives of stars. She is an astrophysicist at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy where she is working on her PhD thesis investigating the lives and deaths of massive binary stars.
Being frustrated with the many unintuitive and cluttered diagrams that are often used in scientific papers, she started to design her own visualizations. What started as a way for her to better analyze the results of her computer simulations of the complexities of the deep interiors of stars that are at the brink of their final explosions, quickly gave her impact when showing these to colleagues at international conferences. Being passionate about teaching and outreach, she realized quickly how her diagrams could be animated and also help students develop a better understanding of how stars work and make her results accessible to the general public.
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