Event Type: Astrophysics Colloquium

“Nadia is an expert in supermassive black holes. She studies how they shape and influence the galaxies that host them, how they launch large galactic-scale winds, how they merge and how they vary in time.” – Anna-Christina Eilers   Image

“Liam is an Assistant Professor at Harvard, working in the field of fast radio bursts (FRB), which he studies by developing large radio facilities and innovative techniques based on artificial intelligence. Liam is a pioneer in using FRBs as astrophysical and cosmological probes such as through gravitational lensing.” – Daniele Michilli Image

“Professor Laura Newburgh is an experimental cosmologist at Yale University. Her lab focuses on 21cm surveys of the large-scale structure of the universe, such as CHIME and HIRAX, and ground-based cosmic microwave background telescopes, such as ACT and the Simon’s Observatory. Through these experiments, Prof. Newburgh investigates fundamental physics, from dark energy to neutrino mass.”

“Greg Bryan chairs the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University. The paper on X-ray clusters that grew out of his PhD thesis with Michael Norman has over 2000 citations. A quarter century ago he was a Hubble Fellow here at MIT. The IMAX film ‘Cosmic Voyage’, for which he did visualizations, was nominated for an

“Professor Smadar Naoz, a distinguished theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducts pioneering research across a broad spectrum of dynamical phenomena. Her work spans cosmology, stellar astrophysics, extrasolar planets, and solar system science. Renowned for her expertise in three-body interactions, Professor Naoz has demonstrated that these interactions can lead to the formation

“Munazza Alam is an Assistant Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Her research focuses on characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets. Munazza uses HST, JWST, and large ground-based telescopes to measure the compositions of Jupiters to super-Earths to understand their origins and evolution.” – Andrew Vanderburg Image

“Phil Hopkins is a professor of astrophysics at CalTech, and one of the main PIs of the FIRE collaboration. he is probably one of the most talented people in the field (or the planet honestly) with numerical codes and high-performance computing.” – Lina Necib Image

“Josh Peek is the head of the data science mission office at Space Telescope Science Institute. He is an amazing and enthusiastic speaker, especially about machine learning.” – Lina Necib Image

“Elisabeth Newton is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth studying the physics of stars and their planets. Elisabeth’s work focuses on the activity and evolution of M-dwarf stars and the impacts of the stars on their orbiting planets. Prior to joining Dartmouth, Elisabeth was formerly a postdoc at MKI.” – Andrew Vanderburg Image

“Professor Dillon Brout is a cosmologist at Boston University, specializing in tying together cosmological distance and velocity measurements to the fundamental properties of the universe such as dark matter and dark energy. He has a leading role in many experiments such as SHOES, Pantheon+, DES, DESI, and DECAT.” – Lina Necib Experimental status of the

“Jeremy Kepner is an MIT Lincoln Laboratory Fellow, and founder of the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center and SuperCloud, which together constitute the largest supercomputing facility in New England. He is also a founder of the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator. He received a PhD in Astrophysics Sciences from Princeton University in 1997, where he worked on

“Jenny Greene is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, who has done some seminal work on massive black holes and their host galaxies. Interestingly, she teaches algebra at NJ state prisons through the Prison Teaching Initiative.” – Lina Necib The nature of ‘Little Red Dots’ One of the most surprising results from JWST has

At the core of galaxy evolution is the evolution of the baryonic components that modify the observable properties of galaxies. A crucial component of baryonic matter is the interstellar medium (ISM) that consists of gas and solid-phase metals called dust. Interstellar dust determines how galaxies look like from UV to sub-mm, how the ISM behaves,

The standard cold dark matter plus cosmological constant model predicts that galaxies form within dark-matter haloes, and that low-mass galaxies are more dark-matter dominated than massive ones. The unexpected discovery of two low-mass galaxies lacking dark matter immediately provoked concerns about the standard cosmology and ignited explorations of alternatives, including self-interacting dark matter and modified

“Professor Jim Fuller is a theoretical astrophysicist based at CalTech with a broad range of interests, including angular momentum transport in stars, pre-supernova outbursts in massive stars, tides in exoplanetary and stellar systems, and asteroseismology, among many other topics.” – Kevin Burdge Stars, planets, and compact objects orbiting with small separations are some of the