NOTE: pre-registration is required
Student Prof Night at the Huether Hotel.
Everyone is encouraged to attend!
Ana Ennis is currently a PhD fellow from CONICET, Argentina, who will soon be joining the University of Waterloo as a postdoctoral fellow. Her main research interests are the formation and evolution of galaxies, and she has mainly worked on studying the evolutionary history of early-type galaxies using discrete tracers such as globular clusters and planetary nebulae.
Jon Carrick is a CFA® charterholder who has focused his career on development finance initiatives across the globe. He is Senior Investment Manager at InfraCo Africa, and has led investments in the water, transport, and power sectors including for renewable grid-tied independent power projects. Jon is a Non-Executive Director for Bboxx, an off-grid service
Emery Trott is a Physics PhD candidate at the University of Michigan advised by Dragan Huterer. Emery is interested in tensions in the LCDM model of the Universe, and is currently working on how gravitational waves can inform us about the Hubble constant.
Dark Siren Gravitational Waves and the Hubble Constant
Sara Issaoun is an NHFP Einstein Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. Her research centers around the collection, calibration, and imaging of millimeter-wave radio observations of supermassive black holes.
NOTE: pre-registration is required
Liza Sazonova is a an incoming postdoctoral fellow at uWaterloo, working on structural evolution of galaxies using the upcoming Rubin LSST survey. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she worked as part of the SPOGs collaboration on trying to understand the life and death of post-starburst galaxies.
Hypothetically speaking, what is believed to account for 85% of matter in the Universe? If you answered, DARK MATTER, then you’re exactly the person we’re looking for! If you didn’t… then join us anyway for a fun evening playing online trivia and pretend like you know the answers!
Mohaddesseh Azimlu completed her PhD dissertation on studying star-forming regions at University of Waterloo in 2009. Then continued her research on star formation in other galaxies at Western University in London, Ontario and later joined Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 2011.
Stefano Camera is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin (Italy), where he returned after having been postdoc and research fellow at the High Technical Institute of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics of The University of Manchester (UK). His research spans various areas of cosmology with surveys of the large-scale structure of the Universe, with a definite pre
Liza Sazonova is a an incoming postdoctoral fellow at uWaterloo, working on structural evolution of galaxies using the upcoming Rubin LSST survey. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she worked as part of the SPOGs collaboration on trying to understand the life and death of post-starburst galaxies.
NOTE: pre-registration is required
Felipe Andrade-Oliveira is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan. His research is focused on the investigation of the Large Scale Structure and the Dark Energy nature through Cosmological Surveys. He works as a Pipeline Scientist for Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) where he is also the co-leader of the covariance topic team.
Scarlata received her PhD from Padova University, in 2004. After holding postdoctoral positions at ETH-Zurich (CH) and Caltech, in 2011 she moved to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she is currently a Distinguished McKnight professor. Her research focus on problems related to the formation and evolution of galaxies.
Mohamad Shalaby is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz institute for astrophysics Potsdam (Germany). His research focuses on studying acceleration, transport and non-thermal radiation processes from plasmas that permeate our visible universe, i.e., from stellar to intergalactic environments and thus their implied complex feedback on various observables. Mohamad attended AIMS (South Africa) and PSI programs before finishing his PhD under the supervision of Avery Broderick in 2017 at University of Waterloo and perimeter institute for theoretical physics.
Talk Title and Abstract
The mechanism of efficient electron acceleration at parallel non-relativistic electron-ion shocks
Cosmic-ray-driven instabilities play a crucial role during particle acceleration at shocks and during the propagation of the accelerated cosmic rays (CR) in galaxies and galaxy clusters. The instabilities amplify magnetic fields and modulate CR transport so that the intrinsically collisionless CR population is coupled to the thermal plasma and provides important dynamical feedback. In this talk, I will discuss a new CR driven instability we recently found (called intermediate-scale instability; Shalaby et al. 2021 [ApJ 908 206]). The new instability excites comoving ion-cyclotron electromagnetic waves at sub-ion skin-depth scale, and operates when the ratio of drift speed with respect to the ion Alfvénic speed is less than sqrt(mi/me)/2, where mi (me) is the ion (electron) mass. Its linear growth rate is typically about 10-20 times faster in comparison to that at the ion gyro-scale making it a crucial player in both acceleration and transport of charged particles in galactic and stellar environments. After a brief discussion of various potential implications of the new instability, I will discuss how we showed using Particle-in-cell simulations that the new instability provides the only known mechanism to date for efficient electron acceleration at parallel electron-ion shocks, and thus solving the long-standing electron-injection problem at these shocks (Shalaby et al. 2022 [ApJ 932 86]). This suggested that common practice of performing plasma simulations with a reduced ion-to-electron mass ratio (where the intermediate instability is suppressed) not only artificially precludes electron acceleration but also results in erroneous electron and ion heating in the downstream and shock transition regions.
Yun Wang has led Galaxy Clustering science on the Roman Space Telescope, and is the deputy lead for Euclid Galaxy Clustering SWG. She is the PI for the proposed NASA space mission concepts, ISCEA (Infrared Satellite for Cosmic Evolution Astrophysics) and ATLAS (Astrophysics Telescope for Large Area Spectroscopy). She is a Senior Research Scientist at IPAC at California Institute of Technology.
Hello everyone!!
To our new students, welcome to Physics at UWaterloo! To those returning, welcome back!
The Big Bang theory tells the story of the beginning of the Universe, our cosmic home for the last 13.8 billion years. But how does the story end? I’ll share what modern astrophysics tells us about the ultimate fate of the cosmos, and what the catastrophic destruction of all reality would look like to anyone still around to see it.
Bio: I just finished my Phd at University of British Columbia with Douglas Scott, and will be starting an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in September (location TBD).
Quantum Perspectives: A Panel Series celebrates 20 years of quantum at the Institute for Quantum Computing. Over the past two decades, IQC’s leading quantum research has powered the development of transformative technologies, from ideas to commercialization, through research in theory, experiment and quantum applications.
Nicole Nesvadba, directrice de recherche at the CNRS, is an expert in galaxy evolution based at the Laboratoire Lagrange at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France.
Ananth Tenneti - I completed my PhD in Physics at Carnegie Mellon University in December 2016. I have studied intrinsic alignments of galaxies using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. Intrinsic alignments are an important astrophysical systematic in the weak lensing analysis for upcoming surveys such as the LSST (Rubin) and Euclid.
