Local Organising Committee (ANU)
- Rajika Kuruwita (chair)
- Fiona Panther
- Melanie Kaasinen
- Eloise Birchall
- Ayan Acharyya
Invited Speakers
- Dr. Brad Tucker
- Prof. Dr. Lisa Kewley
- Dr Ashley Ruiter
- Dr David Nicholls
- Dr Christopher Thom
- Prof. Dr. Martin Asplund
- Dr. Joao Bento
Brad Tucker is an Astrophysicist/Cosmologist, and currently a Research Fellow at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mt. Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University.
Brad received Bachelor’s degrees in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He then undertook a PhD at Mt. Stromlo Observatory at the Australian National University, and is currently working on projects trying to discover the true nature of dark energy. He is the lead of the Kepler Extra-Galactic Survey, a Kepler Space Telescope Key Program, to understand why and how stars blow up. He is also leading a project to build a network of ultraviolet telescopes in the upper atmosphere, which are being built at Mt. Stromlo.
In addition to his research, Brad frequently gives talks to school groups and the general public about Astronomy and has regular segments on various radio and TV stations talking about Astronomy news and events. Among other things, Brad has also developed a series of Astronomy coins in conjunction with the Royal Australian Mint, consulted on science fiction movies, advised on Astronomy-themed art projects, and has been featured in specials on the National Geographic Channel. He is currently in the process of writing his first popular book and producing a Massive Open Online Course.
Brad proudly won best non-science student talk at the 2009 Stromlo Student Christmas Seminars, with his talk on using Scientology to solve cosmology’s biggest problems.
Don’t miss Brad’s interactive talk on outreach at 9:45 on Thursday!!
Professor Kewley is a Professor and Associate Director at the Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University (ANU) where she specialises in galaxy
evolution.
Professor Kewley completed a Bachelor of Science with a BSc(Hons) in astrophysics at The University of Adelaide, and was awarded her doctorate in 2002 from the Australian National University. After leaving Australia in 2001, Professor Kewley was a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Fellow and a NASA Hubble Fellow. She joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii in 2007, where she used the largest telescopes in the northern hemisphere to probe galaxy formation and evolution in the early universe.
While in the US, Kewley was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon and Newton Lacy Pierce Prizes from the American Astronomical Society, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her work. In 2011, she returned to Australia as Professor and an ARC Future Fellow at the Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the ANU.
In 2014, Professor Kewley was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science for her fundamental advances in understanding of the history of the universe, particularly star and galaxy formation.
Lisa is a member of our panel on life inside and outside of academia, and is presenting a not-to-be-missed interactive workshop on academic writing on Thursday at 2pm
Ashley joined the Mt Stromlo
community in 2014 as a SkyMapper
fellow, and is currently a CAASTRO
fellow, where her research interests
include binary star evolution, the
theoretical birthrates and ages of
thermonuclear supernovae and
transients, evolutionary pathways of
gravitational wave sources and galactic
chemical evolution.
Ashley completed both her BSc and MSc in Canada, before taking up her PhD studies at New Mexico State University in the United States. She also completed a one-year pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard, and received her PhD in 2009.
She then moved to Germany to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics in Garching, a position she held from 2009 until 2014, when she and her family moved to Australia.
Ashley is a member of our panel on life inside and outside of academia. Don’t miss what promises to be an excellent and enlightening discussion at 11:30 on Thursday.
An enthusiastic amateur astronomer
from the age of 10, after graduating
with a BSc(Hons in physics from ANU,
David's formal involvement in
astronomy began at Mt Stromlo as a
Summer Vacation Scholar in 1968. At
that time there were only two
computers at ANU, one of which was
an IBM 1620 at Mt Stromlo, on which
he learned to program in FORTRAN
II.
Instead of pursuing a career in astronomy, he headed off to Canada to do his MSc in Upper Atmosphere Physics at the University of Saskatchewan. Due to government cutbacks in the US and Canada, it became pretty clear that a career in physics was not a good idea, so he joined the Australian Public Service, working in science and technology policy and grants program areas.
In 1998 he jumped ship and set up a web design and management consultancy. Then in 2008, instead of taking the obvious course of retiring to a life of golf and bridge, he started back at Mt Stromlo to finish off the long deferred PhD, working under the supervision of Mike Dopita and Helmut Jerjen. Since graduating in 2014, he has been employed as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at RSAA, working with Lisa Kewley, Ralph Sutherland and Mike Dopita. His interests are mainly in the physics of ionised nebulae. He has no plans to quit just yet!
If you have a question for David, he is a member of our panel on working life inside and outside academia at 11:30 on Thursday!
Christopher Thom received his
PhD in astronomy from
Swinburne University in 2006,
working on the high-velocity cloud
problem to understand gas flows
into the Milky Way
After his PhD he did postdocs at the University of Chicago and Space Telescope Science Institute, primarily working on the low-z IGM and the gas-galaxy connection using HSTs UV spectrographs. He made the transition from academia to business in 2012, joining Quantium, where he applies his statistical and data analysis skills to business problems.
Most of his work is in using machinedlearning approaches to leverage the power of large datasets for clients. Most recently he is responsible for the content of the emails you might (or might not get from Woolworths. At Quantium, his team has built a large-scale predictive model to personalise the offers that every Woolworths customer gets in their emails.
He has helped a number of other astronomers make the jump from academia to business, mostly in Data Science roles, and he loves helping people understand their options.
Christopher is a member of our panel on working life inside and outside of academia. If you have a question for Christopher, you will have the opportunity to find the answer during our panel discussion at 11:30 on Thursday.
Prof. Martin Asplund is an ARC Laureate Fellow and a Fellow of
the Australian Academy of Science. Before returning to ANU as a professor
in 2011 he was director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in
Germany. He leads the Galactic Archaeology and Stellar Physics group
at ANU which currently consists besides of himself of four ARC Future Fellows,
two ARC DECRA Fellows, four postdocs, five PhD students and three
professors.
His research is focussed on stellar astrophysics (atmospheres, spectroscopy, evolution, nucleosynthesis) and using stars as probes of the cosmos, from the origin of the solar system and extrasolar planets to the origin of the elements and the history of the Milky Way. He straddles observations, computations and theory in roughly equal measure; he is one the heaviest user of the largest optical telescopes as well as supercomputers in Australia.
Over the past 15 years he has been the main supervisor of 16 PhD students and 24 postdoctoral fellows while mentoring many more early career researchers in Australia and abroad.
Martin will be sharing some of his famous “unsolicited advice” on navigating life in academia at 3:30 on Thursday, which should lead to some lively dinner discussions.!
Joao Bento is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ANU's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. His primary research focus is in Exoplanet discovery and characterisation as well as astronomical software. He is the Australian HATSouth node manager and is a current and former member of various teams related to the search and confirmation of exoplanets, including SuperWASP, the Next Generation Transit Search (NGTS), the Kilo-degree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT-South) and the Transiting Exoplanet CHaracterisation project (TECH).
He was awarded a MSci degree from Imperial College, London and a PhD from Warwick University before taking a postdoc position at Macquarie University working on instrumentation for astronomy with small telescopes. He then moved his position to ANU to continue and expand his research focus and technical areas.
Throughout his professional career so far, a large emphasis was devoted to software pipelines, computational techniques, database and system management in the context of various projects. He is currently working with the Data Reduction Software team for the upcoming Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST) soon to be commissioned at the Gemini telescopes in Chile.
Joao spends most of his time windsurfing, rock climbing, playing pool and music, and very occasionally some time is devoted to that astronomy stuff he's paid for.
Joao will be sharing valuable insights into astronomy software tools at the conclusion of the student talks on Friday
Student Participants
| Anshu Gupta | Australian National University | Rajika Kuruwita | Australian National University |
| Nataliea Lowson | Australian National University | Fiona Panther | Australian National University |
| Tania Barone | Australian National University | Ayan Acharyya | Australian National University |
| Zachary Byrne | University of Queensland | Timothy Crundall | Australian National University |
| Eloise Birchall | Australian National University | Tho Do Duy | UNSW Canberra |
| Natalia Eiré Sommer | Australian National University | Melanie Kaasinen | Australian National University |
| Adam Batten | Macquarie University | James Esdaile | University of New South Wales |
| Michael Cowley | Macquarie University | Matthew Freeman | University of New South Wales |
| Andrew Lehmann | Macquarie University | Wilfred Gee | Macquarie University |
| Adam Rains | Australian National University | Anna Zovaro | Australian National University |
| Dilyar Barat | Australian National University | Harry-Dean Kenchington Goldsmith | Australian National University |
| Sarah McIntyre | Australian National University | Alec Thomson | Australian National University |
| Mason Ng | Australian National University | James Tocknell | Macquarie University |
| Robert Offner | Australian National University | Alexander Lyle Wallace | Australian National University |
| Ryan Ridden-Harper | Australian National University | Rajika Kuruvita | Australian National University |
| Neil Shaw | University of Southern Queensland | Xi Wang | Australian National University |
| Margaret Streamer | Australian National University | Carolyn Wood | University of Queensland |
| Jingling Zhao | University of New South Wales |
A downloadable list of all student participants can be found here.