Introducing Niall Deacon

Niall Deacon is a coordinator at the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education in Heidelberg. Niall did his PhD in Edinburgh and has since held postdoc positions in the Netherlands, USA, Germany and the UK. His research focuses on low mass stars, brown dwarfs and free-floating exoplanets.

In his current job Niall and his colleagues are working to support astronomy educators at primary and secondary level around the world. This includes building a global network of National Education Coordinators (NAECs). If you work in astronomy education and would be interested in becoming a NAEC then follow this link.

Niall is also active in outreach. His popular-level book about exoplanets, Twenty Worlds was recently published by Reaktion Books. He was previously an organizer of Astronomy on Tap Heidelberg, is a former moderator on @astrotweeps and was (way back in the mists of time) the first astrotweep. For the remaining 51 weeks of the year, you can follow Niall at @nialldeacon on Twitter.

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Introducing Adi Foord

Adi Foord is currently a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where she studies pairs of actively accreting supermassive black holes (aka, active galactic nuclei or “AGN”). She spends most of her time running her code BAYMAX (Bayesian AnalYsis of Multiple AGN in X-rays) on Chandra data, finding new AGN pairs and studying their preferential environments. 

In her free time Adi enjoys running, cross-stitch, and tending to her pepper plants. She loves to make a variety of interesting hot sauces throughout the summer using her home-grown peppers

She will be defending her thesis at the end of spring, and then will be moving to sunny California where she will continue studying AGN pairs as a Porat Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University.