From top to bottom, left to right: Marica Branchesi (GSSI), Andrew Levan (Radboud), Elena Pian (INAF), Stephen Smartt (Oxford), Nial Tanvir (Leicester), Darach Watson (NBI).

ENGRAVE receives the Danish Government’s Into Change Award for 2025!

03 December 2025

The ENGRAVE collaboration has been awarded the Danish Government’s Into Change Award for 2025!

To “celebrate the power of European research and innovation in tackling today’s challenges”, the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science inaugurated this year the Into Change Award. The ENGRAVE Collaboration has been awarded the inaugural year’s prize, being recognized as a model of scientific excellence and collaboration, which pursues:

joint European coordination of telescopes and data;
open science with free access to results and datasets;
active involvement and training of young researchers through mentoring and live observation networks.

The University of Oxford submitted the nomination, naming Marica Branchesi, Andrew Levan, Elena Pian, Stephen Smartt, Nial Tanvir, and Darach Watson, for leading specific breakthroughs (both before and after the formation of ENGRAVE) that have established neutron star mergers as cosmic factories of r-process elements. The nomination cited a series of papers between 2013 and 2024, from the discovery of the first kilonova candidate (Tanvir et al. 2013), through the GW170817 breakthrough (Abbott et al. 2017a, 2017b) and the seminal ESO papers (Pian et al. 2017, Smartt et al. 2017, Tanvir et al. 2017), to the spectroscopic identification of the first r-process element in the VLT spectra of AT2017gfo (Watson et al. 2019) and the first James Webb Space Telescope spectra of a kilonova with probable heavy r-process elements (Levan et al. 2024).

The teams behind these results founded ENGRAVE to unite astronomers, physicists, and cosmologists in the search for the Universe’s most extreme events – collisions between neutron stars. The award comes with a prize money of 8 million Danish kroner (about 1 million euro). Each member of the winning group receives a personal honourarium of 100,000 Danish kroner. The remaining funds support further research. The Into Change Award will be presented on December 15, 2025 at the Copenhagen Opera House.