The 2025 MERAC Prize for the Early Career Researcher in Observational Astrophysics has been awarded to Dr Matt Nicholl for his work on explosive transients, compact object mergers and tidal disruption events.

Dr Matt Nicholl completed his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in 2015 and was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Penston Prize for best PhD thesis. He moved to Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow, before moving as RAS Research fellow to the University of Edinburgh, and then as Assistant Professor to the University of Birmingham, where he obtained an ERC Starting grant in 2020. He returned to Queen’s University Belfast in 2023 as Reader. In 2022 he was awarded the Fowler Prize of the RAS. Dr Nicholl played a key role in discoveries including the first electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave source, and in developing analysis techniques now used to model many types of transients.

Dr Matt Nicholl is a leading scientist in the field of explosive transients, compact object mergers and tidal disruption events (TDE) by supermassive black holes. Throughout his career he has consistently applied novel approaches to data to understand transient
physics. He was a pioneer in the use of Bayesian sampling to fit lightcurve models to observational data, releasing a widely used statistical analysis package (MOSFiT). He played an influential role in the beginning of multi-messenger astronomy, initially by
obtaining spectra and leading one of the discovery papers on the binary neutron star merger and gravitational wave event GW170817, and later adapting his modelling techniques to combine the gravitational wave and electromagnetic measurements to tightly constrain kilonova properties. His group used this multi-messenger framework in the detection and interpretation of the two best-observed kilonovae since GW170817.

He has continued his work on extreme supernovae, using Hubble Space Telescope images and late-time spectra to reveal evidence for rapidly rotating engines inside these explosions, and discovering the supernova that holds the record for the highest integrated luminosity.  Turning to TDEs, he characterized how their spectra evolve and found definitive evidence for outflowing gas, and discovered a new class of luminous fast transients, which may be the disruptions of stars by low-mass black holes. He proved the causal connection between TDEs and X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions, pioneering techniques to measure TDE disk sizes and constrain the eruption mechanisms. His group developed the NEEDLE machine learning code and are using this to find and publicly report rare transients in real time. 

The work was conducted at Queen's University Belfast (UK), Harvard (USA), University of Edinburgh (UK), University of Birmingham (UK).