Events

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.

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.