The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration will receive the 2026 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. Established in 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the Berkeley prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting.
The DESI collaboration is being honored with the 2026 Berkeley prize for their work creating the largest 3D map of the universe, enabling the study of the effects of dark energy over cosmic time, and particularly for precise measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations as a function of redshift all the way to z = 2.3, when the universe was less than three billion years old.
Each year the three AAS Vice Presidents, in consultation with the Editor in Chief of the AAS journals, select the Berkeley prize winner for meritorious research published within the preceding 12 months. This year’s prize recognizes the DESI team for not one, but two articles in the past year. The first, published in February 2025 in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, presents results from the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations — a pattern of subtle variations in the density of baryonic matter imprinted by sound waves traveling through the early universe — based on data from the first year of DESI operations. The second, released by the collaboration in March 2025, encompasses the first three years of DESI operations, analyzing a sample of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars to test the leading cosmological model.
The observations not only constitute the largest 3D map of the Universe ever made, they also provide new insights into the nature of dark energy and the evolution of the Universe. When combined with other cosmological constraints, the DESI results provide strong hints that dark energy evolves over time, challenging our current leading model of the Universe, Lambda CDM.
ICE-CSIC has a strong involvement in the DESI collaboration. The Institute, together with IFAE, has built the guiding and focusing of the Guiding, Focusing and Alignment system (GFAs) units of the instrument. ICE-CSIC also developed the guiding software. We also lead the Image Validation Working Group and participate in the collaboration management in the institutional board, and membership committee.
“It is an honour to receive this prize in recognition of our experiment that is changing our understanding of the universe", says Francisco Castander, ICE-CSIC and IEEC researcher and deputy chair of the DESI institutional board.
The Berkeley Prize will be accepted on behalf of the collaboration by Daniel Eisenstein, a member of the DESI Executive Committee and former DESI spokesperson. Eisenstein will give the prize lecture on 8 January 2026, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
