Events

Talk Title and Abstract:

Michael R. Meyer is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan.  He was Chair of Star and Planet Formation at the ETH in Zürich and was formerly a Professor/Astronomer at the Department of Astronomy/Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona.  He was a Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona and did a post-doc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomie.

Dr. Andrew Pontzen is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor of Cosmology at the University College London (UCL). He obtained his PhD from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge in 2009.  His work focuses on understanding dark matter – a mysterious component of the universe that is hypothesised to drive the formation of galaxies and other structures.

Lauren Foster

Lauren Foster is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the Physics and Astronomy program at Waterloo. She started working with Dr. Percival in May 2021 on a project exploring the use of machine learning to identify dark matter halos in redshift-space.

Talk Title and Abstract:

Professor Laura Fissel is an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen's University.  Her research focuses on building stratospheric balloon-borne telescopes, which operate above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere, allowing astronomers to observe radiation that would otherwise require a much more expensive space telescope.

Dr. Angelo Ricarte is a theoretical astrophysicist and Black Hole Initiative (BHI) fellow at the BHI at Harvard University.  He completed his undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley in 2013 before completing a Ph.D.

Jiamin is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow hosted by the University of Florida and the Max-Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial physics. She is interested in cosmology and applying summary statistics to the large-scale structure to understand the early Universe as well as fundamental laws of physics.

David is a Blavatnik and Rothchild fellow at the University of Cambridge, testing theories of gravity with diverse methods. My main research recently is focused on Binary motion of stars (pulsars, Gravitational waves, Gaia...) and Binary galaxies to test dark energy and modified gravity.

Arthur is currently a research fellow at the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh (and about to move to The Oskar Klein Centre in Stockholm in March). He graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with a master's from the University of Sao Paulo and a PhD from University College London in 2019.