YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 5, ARMENPRESS. American poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman was awarded with Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in Yerevan on the sidelines of the STARMUS VI Festival, for presenting science and nature through her works. 

STARMUS Founding Director Garik Israelian and editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine David Eicher handed over the Medal.

“I am very pleased to receive this award. Thank you for everything you do here. You serve science and art with so much love and pleasure. Thanks to you, the world becomes more beautiful for me”, she said.

Under the name of the greatest scientist of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Stephen Hawking, and sponsored by Starmus, the Stephen Hawking Science Medal is a prestigious award which recognizes the merit of popular science on an international level.

The design of the medal used a portrait of Professor Hawking by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to perform a spacewalk and member of the Advisory Council Starmus since its first edition. The other side combines the image of Alexei Leonov of the first spacewalk and the iconic guitar – the “Red Special” – to demonstrate music, another major component of the Starmus Festival.