Events

Kevin Croker is an Assistant Research Scientist at Arizona State University in the School of Earth and Space Exploration working on the phenomenology of strong gravitation.  He jointly holds an Affiliate Graduate Faculty position at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa where he previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship and earned his PhD in Physics.  He is a Fulbright and NSF East-Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes alumnus and holds a BSc in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis

"A new data analysis paradigm for strong lensing data analysis."

Yashar Hezaveh is an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and director of the Montréal Institute for Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning (Ciela). He is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Université de Montréal and the Canada Research Chair in Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning. In addition, Hezaveh is an associate member of McGill University’s Trottier Space Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute in New York and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

Astronomy on Tap 9 October 2024.

Sit back, relax, and learn about the Universe, while also having a couple of drinks and a bit of fun. This month we will learn about dark energy with Tristan Fraser and Batia Friedman-Shaw! 

Neige Frankel is a postdoctoral fellow at CITA in Toronto. She obtained her Master's at Lund Observatory in Sweden and her PhD in Heidelberg in Germany, where she worked on the evolution of the Milky Way disk. She wants to understand how galaxies form and evolve, and she is generally interested in all systems where we can resolve individual stars, and in the statistical methodologies that allow us to do justice to the immense data sets we are getting. Her main focus has been the Milky Way, and its most recent evolution.

Patrick is a graduate student at McGill University whose work is primarily focused on brightest cluster galaxies, cosmological simulations, and data-driven approaches to astronomy. He works in Tracy Webb's galaxy evolution group at McGill and Laurence Perreault-Levasseur's group at the University of Montreal, which focuses on applying techniques from statistics and machine learning to solve problems in astrophysics. He is also a member of The Three Hundred collaboration, which studies properties of over 300 simulated galaxy clusters and their environment. His current work involves bridging the gap between simulations and observations, as well as automating the identification of brightest cluster galaxies for upcoming large surveys.

Mohamad Shalaby is a HAPI Fellow jointly appointed between the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo.  His research involves modeling—both numerically and semi-analytically—the acceleration, transport, and non-thermal radiation processes in astrophysical plasmas that permeate the visible universe. These processes span environments from stellar to intergalactic scales, with complex feedback mechanisms influencing a variety of astrophysical observables.

Understanding how stars form is a vital aspect of many areas of astronomy. From one perspective, star formation is a crucial part of understanding how galaxies evolve – from another, star formation can help us determine where planets exist that have the potential to host life. In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Ashley Bemis will discuss what we learn about star formation by looking at where stars are being born in nearby galaxies – and within our own Milky Way.

Jennifer Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, supported by joint CITA and University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science fellowships. She earned her Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Astrophysics from University College London, and a Bachelor's in Physics from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on investigating the origins, evolution, and properties of large-scale magnetic fields in the Universe, essential for understanding their impact on cosmic structures.

Ralph Pudritz is a theoretical astrophysicist at McMaster University, whose research focuses on star and planet formation, and origins of life. Ralph is the founding (2004-2015) Director of McMaster's Origins Institute (OI).

Matías Bravo is a Herschel Fellow at McMaster University. His research explores the formation and evolution of galaxies at a population level through a combination of state-of-the-art semi-analytic models and large-scale spectroscopic galaxy surveys, with a special focus on the physical mechanisms regulating star formation at a galaxy scale like environmental processes and AGN feedback. .