The George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award ($75,000) winner was Kaitlyn Wang (CA) for her project "PHYS056: Ultra-Short-Period Planets Discovered by ExoScout". She developed "an efficient way to identify certain exoplanets that orbit very closely around their stars." Previous techniques used to detect these ultra-short-period planets required enormous computational power but were not as effective at identifying these planets. Kaitlyn surmounted that problem by creating a special algorithm that runs on cheap hardware and results in much faster and higher-precision findings. Using her research, she says she found "the smallest of these planets ever discovered."
