The Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) honours six astronomers at its Annual Scientific Meeting in Adelaide this week. One of these astronomers was CSIRO researcher Dr Joshua Preston Pritchard.

Joshua is the recipient of the ASA’s Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize for his work in designing and developing a processing pipeline package to hunt for radio transients.

Specifically designed for radio interferometric data, DStools was released in 2024 and has already been instrumental in discoveries outlined in at least five high-impact journal publications, including in Nature and Nature Astronomy.

The package was remarked to be an outstanding contribution to open-source astronomical software, which constructs and analyses dynamic spectra, providing an incredibly rich source of information for studying short-timescale radio variables and transients.

DStools allows for those of all experience levels to process data, opening up complex data pipelines to a broader research community.

With the detection of transients – particularly long-period transients – being so difficult to confirm, this new package will continue to lead to deeper analysis of candidates and more discoveries.

President of the ASA Stas Shabala said all the 2025 ASA’s prize winners are demonstrating the strength of Australian astronomy on the world stage, including investigating how galaxies form and evolve, and developing new tools to explore the cosmos.

Read more on the Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize on the ASA website. This award is sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons.