The Shaw Prize in Astronomy  2013  Laureate

Steven A Balbus was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, USA and is currently Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, UK. He received BS degrees in both Mathematics and Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, obtained his PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, and held postdoctoral positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, USA. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1985, moved to the École Normale Supérieure de Paris in 2004 and joined the University of Oxford in September 2012. 

The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2013 is awarded in equal shares to Steven A Balbus and John F Hawley for their discovery and study of the magnetorotational instability, and for demonstrating that this instability leads to turbulence and is a viable mechanism for angular momentum transport in astrophysical accretion disks.