Events

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.

 

On April 8, Southern Ontario will witness a total solar eclipse for the first time in nearly 100 years, as the Moon blocks out the light of the Sun for several minutes. Total eclipses are an amazing spectacle, but have also played a key role throughout history in our understanding of science. At this month's KPL astronomy talk, Dr. Roan Haggar will speak about the upcoming solar eclipse, and what eclipses have taught us about the Sun, our Solar System, and the Universe.

Kollmeier joined the staff at Carnegie Institution for Science in 2008 and is the Founding Director of the Carnegie Theoretical Astrophysics Center.  In 2017 she assumed the position of Director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Phase 5 (SDSS-V) which is a robotic spectroscopic exploration of the sky in optical and near-IR bands.  From 2021-2024 she was the Director of Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).

Shokoufeh Faraji is a Postdoc in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Waterloo Center for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo. She finished her PhD at ZARM Institute at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research areas include but not limited to the general theory of relativity, accretion discs, and quasi-periodic oscillations with (semi-) analytical methods. 

This month we'll hear from two University of Waterloo astronomers, researching the evolution of galaxies. Cam Morgan will speak about how the cosmic neighbourhood of galaxies impacts their life cycles, and Cam Lawlor-Forsyth will share how astronomers are using super-computers to learn more about galaxies than ever before.

Canada has made significant contributions ever since the early days of space-based astronomy, and now the prospect of a flagship Canadian-led space telescope as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is alive and well. At this month's KPL astronomy talk, Cam Morgan will speak about the CASTOR mission, an ultra-violet telescope that promises to compliment other cutting-edge missions, such as Euclid and the Roman Space Telescope, throughout the 2030s.

Niko Šarčević is a cosmologist working at Newcastle University, and is part of the LSST DESC. Her research focuses on modelling and mitigating the intrinsic alignment of galaxies in weak lensing measurements. Niko is also interested in the statistical problems for late-time cosmology.