Bobby Bickley is an astronomy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC). He also holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut.
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 KPL.
Gerrit Farren is a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge working primarily on CMB lensing and CMB lensing cross-correlations. Originally from Mönchengladbach in Germany, Gerrit studied at Haverford College in Philadelphia working with Bruce Partridge and Daniel Grin, before moving to Cambridge to pursue his PhD under the supervision of Blake Sherwin.
Sean Ressler is a postdoctoral fellow at CITA working on general relativistic and Newtonian simulations of black hole accretion. The motivation of his work is to make these simulations more realistic by incorporating more physics, more observational input, or connecting smaller scales to larger scales (or vice versa).
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.