This week features Michelle Collins, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. Most of her work focuses on studying the dynamics of stars within our neighbouring spiral galaxy system, Andromeda. She uses these measurements to better understand how spiral galaxies form, and to ascertain the nature of dark matter.
Michelle originally hails from just outside of London in the UK. She studied Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Manchester as an undergraduate, where she met the famous Brian Cox, but doubts he remembers. After taking a year off to see some of the World, she set about getting a PhD at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, where she learned and discovered a lot about the mass profiles of dwarf galaxies, and their importance for understanding the rest of the Universe. When not tweeting for @astrotweeps, she can be found running, reading, traveling, and tweeting as @michelle_lmc.
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