Events

Marta Bryan received a BA in astrophysics from Harvard in 2012 and a PhD in astrophysics from Caltech in 2018.  She then held a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellowship followed by a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Sagan fellowship at UC Berkeley.  Since January 2023, she has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto.

Hyunseop (Joseph) Choi earned his PhD at the University of Oklahoma in 2022, and he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at l'Université de Montréal. Collaborating with Dr. Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, his work focuses on observational studies of AGN feedback.

Alexandra Amon, based at Princeton University, is primarily interested in understanding the evolution and composition of the Universe, including its dark components. She is an expert in weak lensing, working very closely with data and has a keen interest in the intersection with large-scale structure surveys.

This month we'll hear from two astronomers from the University of Waterloo about the impact of eclipses on science, culture and history. Kat Frazer will share the role total eclipses played in proving Einstein's theory of general relativity, and Liza Sazonova will explore how eclipses have been viewed as dark omens throughout history.

Ian Roberts earned his PhD from McMaster University in 2020, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leiden Observatory until 2023, and is currently a Banting Fellow at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics.  His research interests cover various aspects of galaxy evolution, across multiple wavelengths, with a focus on the impact of the galaxy cluster environment on star formation.

Most galaxies harbour monster black holes, millions to billions of times the Sun's mass, at their centres. These black holes are central to how galaxies formed, and how they have evolved, over nearly 14 billion years of existence. At this month's KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Brian McNamara will speak about these supermassive black holes, explaining how they work and how astronomers learn about them.

Born in South Africa with a PhD from the University of Cape Town, Dr. Michelle Lochner is a Senior Lecturer with a joint position between the University of the Western Cape and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (formerly SKA South Africa). Her focus is on cosmology and trying to get the best out of combining optical and radio telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, as well as the Square Kilometre Array and its precursor, MeerKAT, in South Africa.

Ting Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and an Associated Faculty Member of the Dunlap Institute, at the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto in 2021, she was the 2019 NASA Hubble Fellow at Carnegie Observatories, with a joint appointment in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University as a Carnegie-Princeton Fellow.

After his bachelor’s degree in Physics and the Master’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Davide Sciotti started his PhD thesis on assessing the constraints on the cosmological parameters from the Euclid photometric survey. In particular, he investigated the impact of one of the non-Gaussian contributions to the total data covariance matrix, super-sample covariance, on weak lensing and galaxy clustering signals and their cross-correlation.

Ashley Bemis earned her PhD from McMaster University in 2020 working with Christine Wilson, was a Postdoctoral Fellow and ALMA Support Scientist in the Dutch ARC Node at Leiden Observatory until 2023, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. Her research interests include star formation in more extreme environments of nearby galaxies, with a focus on understanding the efficiency of star formation from dense, molecular gas.