Introducing Rachael Ainsworth

Rachael Ainsworth (@rachaelevelyn) is a Research Associate at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA) at the University of Manchester. Her expertise lies in the interpretation of radio emission from protostellar systems in nearby star forming regions, particularly at very long (metre) wavelengths. Her primary research interests include astrophysical jets/outflows, star formation and evolution. She works on the Horizon 2020 RadioNET “Radio Interferometry Next Generation Software” (RINGS) project to develop software for calibrating dispersive delay corrections in long baseline radio interferometry for long wavelength telescopes such as the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR).

She is Open Science Champion for the Interferometry Centre of Excellence at JBCA, where she promotes, advocates and organises events relating to open science in astronomy. She is also a Mozilla Open Leader running the open project Resources for Open Science in Astronomy (ROSA), which aims to compile and tailor open science best practices from around the web into a toolkit for astronomers to work openly from proposal to publication. This project seeks input from the entire astronomy community, so feel to bookmark https://github.com/rainsworth/ROSA and become a contributor to the project in the coming weeks.

Rachael also organises the Manchester chapter of XX+Data (@xxplusdatamcr) – a community for women who work with and love data. The goal of the community is to bring together women with diverse expertise and experience to support one another, share experiences and talk data.

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Introducing Will Armentrout

Will Armentrout (@WillArmentrout) is a doctoral student at West Virginia University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. A graduate of Westminster College (@WestminsterPA), his roots are in Ford City, Pennsylvania, a glass town northeast of Pittsburgh. He’s in his last year of graduate school at WVU, studying high-mass star formation and Galactic HII regions with Prof. Loren Anderson (@Loren__Anderson). HII regions are areas of ionized gas surrounding young, high-mass stars and can help us to understand the structure, formation, and chemistry of galaxies. Will’s current project involves observing HII regions in the most distant molecular spiral arm within the Milky Way, known as the Outer Scutum-Centaurus spiral arm.

Will is spending this week at the Green Bank Telescope (@IamGBT), smack in the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, which will certainly make tweeting a bit difficult! Primarily a radio astronomer, he is the principal investigator on projects with the GBT and the Very Large Array (@TheNRAO). He has recently moved into optical astronomy, though, with a project at the Gemini North Observatory (@GeminiObs).

Outside of research, he co-founded the West Virginia University Science Policy Organization (@WVUScience) in 2014. The group aims to open communication channels between university scientists and policy makers on the state and federal level and to also convey the importance (and excitement!) of basic and applied scientific research to the public. He also serves as president of the WVU Graduate and Professional Student Senate (@WVUGPSS), a group dedicated to keeping graduate students part of the larger campus conversation at WVU.

Introducing Duncan Forgan

Dr Duncan Forgan is a postdoc at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He did his PhD and first postdoc at the nearby University of Edinburgh, where his focus was simulations of star and planet formation at very early epochs.

During his PhD he explored numerical approaches to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which often makes headlines. He does his best to parlay this attention into public outreach, engaging with wide audiences from school kids to gamers to prisoners.

He is a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland, a diverse grouping of academics, civil servants and third sector workers gathered to answer the challenges facing Scotland in the 21st Century, and to be a voice for the young.

Duncan will be tweeting from California this week, as he visits the Berkeley SETI Research Center. He’ll still give a flavour of academic life in beautiful St Andrews, and his country life replete with chickens in the back yard, and nosey horses for neighbours.

Introducing Ana Weigel

Anna Weigel (@annakweigel) is a third year Ph.D. student at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the connection between galaxies and their black holes. Specifically she studies if and how active black holes might be shutting down star formation in their host galaxies. Instead of closely examining single objects, Anna is combining phenomenological and statistical approaches. This means looking for trends and correlations in the local galaxy population as a whole.

Anna received her B.S. in physics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and then moved to Switzerland for her M.Sc. in physics at ETH. Before starting her Ph.D., she spent three months at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in beautiful Melbourne. Anna enjoys teaching, which is part of her Ph.D. student duties, and doing outreach. For example, building galaxies with kids has taught her that 7-year olds and glitter glue do not mix well. From time to time Anna also likes to visualise science in the form of delicious cakes.

Reintroducing Ángel López-Sánchez

Ángel a Spanish astrophysicist working at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Macquarie University (MQ) in Sydney (Australia). His research is focused in the analysis of star formation phenomena in galaxies of the Local Universe, especially in dwarf starbursts and spiral galaxies. He uses a multiwavelength approach and hence he combines ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio data to characterize the physical and chemical properties of galaxies and get a better understanding of the physical processes than govern their nature and evolution.

He has large experience teaching and supporting undergraduate and PhD students and giving lectures and classes about Astronomy. Outreach is a very important part of his work as a scientist. As an active amateur astronomer he enjoys observing the sky with his eyes, binoculars, or small telescopes and taking astronomical images using his own equipment. This webpage contains a large compilation of my images that includes galaxies, nebulae, astronomical observatories, time-lapse videos, and even drawings and photos taken using amateur techniques. The majority of these images are hosted on his Flickr webpage.

Ángel originally from the beautify city of Córdoba (Spain). He got his Physics Degree at the University of Granada in 2000 and his PhD Thesis at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias / La Laguna University (Tenerife, Spain) in 2006. Between 2007 and 2010 he worked at the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (Australia Telescope National Facility), obtaining many radio and optical data of galaxies of the Local Volume. Part of his actual job is providing support to the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

He was the first Spanish astronomer hosting a blog only dedicated to Astronomy, El Lobo Rayado (here the English Translation using Google), which was created in early 2004. Since 2011 he also maintain a blog in English, The Lined Wolf, which is focused on publicising his scientific work and outreach activities in Australia. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Introducing Angel Lopez-Sanchez

Angel a Spanish astrophysicist working at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) and the Astronomy, Astrophysics and Astrophotonic Department of the Macquarie University (MQ) in Sydney (Australia). His research is focused in the analysis of star formation phenomena in galaxies of the Local Universe, especially in dwarf starbursts and spiral galaxies. He uses a multiwavelength approach and hence he combines ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio data to characterize the physical and chemical properties of galaxies and get a better understanding of the physical processes than govern their nature and evolution.

He has large experience teaching and supporting undergraduate and PhD students and giving lectures and classes about Astronomy. Outreach is a very important part of his work as a scientist. As an active amateur astronomer he enjoys observing the sky with his eyes, binoculars, or small telescopes and taking astronomical images using his own equipment. This webpage contains a large compilation of my images that includes galaxies, nebulae, astronomical observatories, time-lapse videos, and even drawings and photos taken using amateur techniques. The majority of these images are hosted on his Flickr webpage.

Angel originally from the beautify city of Córdoba (Spain). He got his Physics Degree at the University of Granada in 2000 and his PhD Thesis at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias / La Laguna University (Tenerife, Spain) in 2006. Between 2007 and 2010 he worked at the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (Australia Telescope National Facility), obtaining many radio and optical data of galaxies of the Local Volume. Part of his actual job is providing support to the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

He was the first Spanish astronomer hosting a blog only dedicated to Astronomy, El Lobo Rayado (here the English Translation using Google), which was created in early 2004. Since 2011 he also maintain a blog in English, The Lined Wolf, which is focused on publicising his scientific work and outreach activities in Australia. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Introducing Tom Rice

Tom Rice is a second-year astronomy PhD student at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the environments in which stars and planets are born, and he’s currently working on creating the first catalog of star-forming molecular clouds throughout the Milky Way. In the past, he’s studied how the infrared brightness of young, disked stars changes over time, and for his PhD thesis plans to study the role of nitrogen astrochemistry in planetary formation, with his advisor Ted Bergin.

Tom is an Oregon native and attended Harvard as an undergrad. As a child of deaf adults (CODA), Tom grew up speaking American Sign Language (ASL) alongside English bilingually, and aspires to develop astronomy curricula in ASL for education and outreach to Deaf youth. Tom tweets at @tomr_stargazer when not astro-tweeping, is an avid stargazer and occasional guitarist, and only listens to the Mountain Goats.

Introducing Robert Fisher

This week features Robert Fisher. Bob is a computational astrophysicist primarily interested in the two endpoints in the lives of stars — stellar birth and death. He is keenly interested in the origin of a certain class of stellar explosions resulting from white dwarf stars, which astronomers have used to measure distances across the vast reaches of the cosmos — yet still do not fully understand. In his research, he seeks to understand the origins of these tremendous stellar explosions by simulating them on some of the world’s largest computers. As an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, he mentors an active research group of future computational astrophysicists and scientists, and engages the broader university student population in astronomy and physics education. He also serves on a variety of committees, at the national level, the state level, and the university-level, which seek to advance high-performance computing research across disciplines. Some time in between all of this, you’re likely to find him in the kitchen cooking Persian or Italian food with his wife, Pamela, an art historian. After this week, you’ll find him back at @fisherastro on Twitter.

Introducing Sarah Tuttle

Sarah Tuttle was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California.  She received her PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University where she flew balloons for a living.  They mostly only crashed in a controlled way, on purpose.  She currently works for McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin building astronomical instruments and hunting dark energy. As the instrument scientist for VIRUS, she is building a massively replicated spectrograph that takes 33,600 simultaneous spectra to feed 150 identical spectrographs.  When she finishes building them all.  Her science interests currently meander through topics in galaxy evolution, especially gas and the regulation of star formation.   She lives with her husband and children in Austin.  When she isn’t swinging wrenches in the name of science, she is chasing chickens in the backyard or checking on the family beehive.  Sarah loves academia enough to believe it is broken, but worth fixing. She would be happy to fight a cage match about ways we can improve our gender, racial, and socio-economic diversity as a field.

Sarah’s Astrotweeps week can be found here: http://sfy.co/SUNw