The Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research is awarded by the University of Hawaiʻi Board of Regents in recognition of scholarly contributions that expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community.
Benjamin Shappee
Benjamin Shappee is an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy. He specializes in transients and time-domain astronomy. Shappee is a founding member of one of the most successful time-domain projects, the All-Sky Automated Survey for Super-Novae (ASAS–SN), which uses telescopes around the globe to survey the entire sky daily.
The ASAS–SN survey paper (Shappee et al. 2014) is the 50th most-cited paper in astronomy in the past decade. Shappee is co-principal investigator of the largest near-infrared supernova survey to date, the Hawaiʻi Supernova Flows, using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on Maunakea.
He and his group have made important contributions to our understanding of the origins of supernovae (exploding stars), stellar flares with potential impact on the habitability of nearby planets, and outbursts from supermassive black holes. ASAS–SN found the most luminous supernova yet discovered (ASASSN-15lh). Shappee was also part of the team that discovered the first and only counterpart to gravitational wave source from the merger of two neutron stars. He has authored 275 publications and has 20,000 citations.
Malte Stuecker
Malte Stuecker is an assistant professor in oceanography at the International Pacific Research Center in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. Stuecker’s research is on climate variability and climate change in the past, present and future.
Much of his work is centered on the Pacific Ocean and phenomena such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Stuecker earned a PhD in meteorology from UH Mānoa in 2015. He returned to UH as faculty in 2020, and was previously an assistant project leader/research professor at the IBS Center for Climate Physics in South Korea.
Stuecker received the IAPSO Early Career Scientist Medal in Physical Oceanography in 2023, the Kamide Lecture Award from the AOGS Atmospheric Sciences section in 2020, and the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the EGU Climate: Past, Present & Future division in 2016. In 2018, he was a Future Leaders Program Fellow of the Science and Technology in Society forum in Kyoto (Japan), and in 2022 he received an NSF CAREER Award.
Donald Womack
Donald Reid Womack is a professor of music in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Arts, Languages & Letters. A faculty member at UH since 1994, Womack chairs the music department, and is faculty in Japanese and Korean Studies.
He is the composer of more than 100 original works, which have been performed and broadcast in 25 countries and recorded on more than a dozen releases in the U.S., Korea and Japan. Ensembles around the globe have performed his works, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, Russia Ulan Ude Symphony, Hawaii Symphony, National Orchestra of Korea, among many others.
Womack is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fulbright Fellowships, two Artist Fellowships from the State of Hawaiʻi, and won numerous other national and international competitions. Widely recognized as a leader in intercultural composition, he integrates East Asian and western instruments. He has lectured on his work in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and taught as visiting faculty at Seoul National University.
