Norbert Werner is a professor of Physics & Astronomy and leader of the high energy astrophysics group at Masaryk University at Brno in the Czech Republic.
Pierre Burger is a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Mike Hudson. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Bonn in Germany. His research focuses on observational cosmology and the large-scale structure of the Universe concentrating on the information content beyond Gaussian statistics.
Sara Ellison received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Cambridge. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, she moved to the University of Victoria in 2003 to take up a Canada Research Chair where she has been a full professor since 2014.
Xinyi Chen is a graduate student at Yale University, working on large-scale structure cosmology with Prof. Nikhil Padmanabhan. Her research combines machine learning, statistics and theoretical modeling to probe the nature of dark energy and inflation via large galaxy surveys such as Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).
WCA-KPL public talk - Gravitational Lensing: A tool to study the Universe by Jordan Ducatel
This month, we'll hear from two astronomers based in KW who are trying to understand dark matter. Luna Zagorac, from the Perimeter Institute, will talk about a range of hypothetical "astrophysical beasties" that could make up dark matter, and Rashaad Reid from the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics will share how we can use the Sun as a laboratory to detect dark matter.
Syeda Lammim Ahad started as a WCA Postdoctoral Fellow in December 2023. She completed her PhD in Astrophysics from Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands, in November 2023, where she studied galaxy groups and clusters and galaxy evolution within these systems by detailed comparison of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with recent observational data.
Harry Desmond is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth. He completed his PhD at Stanford in 2017 and then held postdoctoral fellowships at Oxford and CMU.
Jerome Quintin completed his PhD at McGill University in 2019, and after that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany. Jerome has been at the University of Waterloo since 2022, holding the Faculty of Mathematics Prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The WCA-KPL Astronomy Talk series takes place on the last Wednesday of each month, and is jointly organized by the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and Kitchener Public Library.