EAPS UROP Daniel Kurlander named a winner of the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data
A snapshot from Kurlander's project, An Interactive System for Rapidly Filtering and Displaying Images from the Rosetta Comet Mission.
Daniel Kurlander, a sophomore in aeronautics and astronautics, was one of ten projects named winners of the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, selected from a pool of more than 80 nominations across MIT. The MIT Prize for Open Data, run by the MIT Libraries, aims to promote transparency and reproducibility of research through open data policies.
“I am honored and super excited to win this award,” says Kurlander, who was the only undergraduate to receive the award this year. “The objective of my tool is the democratization and improvement of public access to this data set, and for MIT to recognize this project as adding value to the world is very special to me.”
Kurlander’s project, An Interactive System for Rapidly Filtering and Displaying Images from the Rosetta Comet Mission, is an online tool that allows users to access and filter images of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It began as a UROP overseen by Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Scientist Jason Soderblom.
“I was inspired to do this project because from a young age, I have loved all things space related. This project allowed me to work with some amazing data and play around with images of a comet all day,” Kurlander says. He thanks Soderblom and Cornell University PhD student Abhinav Jindal for their leadership and mentoring on the project.
A celebration will be held on October 24 at Hayden Library where winners will have the chance to give a short talk about their project.
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