Introducing Meg Rosenburg

Dr. Meg Rosenburg is a freelance science communicator, content producer, and independent scholar based in the Boston area.  In 2014, she earned her Ph.D. from Caltech in Planetary Science, with an extra focus in the history of science, and she’s especially interested in impact craters on the Moon and Earth, their contribution to planetary topography, and how they have been interpreted over the centuries.  While in grad school, she produced The PHD Movie with web comic artist Jorge Cham, an opportunity that opened her eyes to the world of science communication. Since then, she’s created award-winning animated science videos and collaborated with numerous academic researchers and science communicators to convey complex subjects to the public.  In particular, she sees science, history, and digital media as an especially rich combination, and is pursuing several projects along these lines while carving out time for her research into the history of planetary studies.  She tweets @trueanomalies and blogs occasionally at www.trueanomalies.com, and examples of her work can be found on her website (www.megrosenburg.com).

Introducing Richard Scalzo

This week’s Astrotweeps host is Richard Scalzo.  Richard earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 2004, where he contributed to the design, construction, and operation of the STACEE high-energy gamma ray telescope.  He has held postdoctoral positions in astrophysics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Yale University, and most recently at the Australian National University, where he studied the progenitors and explosion physics of type Ia supernovae.  At ANU, he also led the ongoing development and operation of a search for type Ia supernovae in data from the SkyMapper robotic telescope, including the crowdsourced “Snapshot Supernova” project in collaboration with the Zooniverse citizen science community, as featured on BBC Two’s Stargazing Live in March 2015.

Richard currently works as a Research Engineer in the new Centre for Translational Data Science at the University of Sydney.  His main role is to develop probabilistic graphical models of human metabolism, to be deployed for discovery in basic biological science and for personalized medicine.  He remains engaged with the astronomical community and hopes to continue working on astronomy-related data science projects from time to time.  He tweets as @scalzonova on Twitter.