Events

Tanveer Karim is an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2023. He is currently a co-lead of the Lyman-Break Galaxies Topical Team in the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) and has led efforts related to the Emission-Line Galaxies in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Collaboration. 

Luciano Combi is an astrophysicist interested in gravitation, compact objects, high-energy astrophysics, and foundations of science.  He is doing his first postdoc at Perimeter Institute with a joint appointment as a CITA National Fellow (U of Guelph).

Dr. Eve J. Lee is an Assistant Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Physics at McGill, and a member of the Trottier Space Institute and the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets. She leads a theoretical astrophysics group focusing on the formation of planets and stars.

Cosmology is the study of the Universe as a whole, and asks questions like "How did the Universe begin?" and "What is our Universe made of?". However, answering these questions comes at a cost: huge questions require huge quantities of data, and huge amounts of analysis. At September's WCA-KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Marco Bonici will discuss how a new tool -- Artificial Intelligence -- is helping cosmologists to understand the data collected from telescopes, and answer the fundamental questions about the cosmos.

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.

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.