Fall-2019

12:40 - 1:30 PM every Thursday, location = 131 A & B Campbell Hall.

    • To volunteer for a 12 minute talk + 3 minutes for questions, send email to Paul Kalas (kalas@berkeley.edu).

  • This forum is mainly for local scientists of any level to present their work to a broad spectrum of the department, and usually includes one short talk by the astronomy colloquium speaker of the day.

  • Subjects can include personal scientific research, reporting on other work appearing in journals, education and public outreach efforts, science policy, and professional development issues.

  • It is preferred if speakers bring their own laptop, cable adapter (we have some), and laser pointer. Presentations may also use the whiteboard.

  • Scientists from other institutions need to have a local scientist hosting their visit to Berkeley before they can request a talk slot.

Bold means confirmed

August 29:

  • 1-minute talks from members of the department (UC Berkeley)

September 5:

  • Keming Zhang (UC Berkeley) - deepCR: Cosmic Ray Rejection with Deep Learning

    • Nir Mandelker (Yale) - Shattering of Cosmic Sheets due to Thermal Instabilities: a Formation Channel for Metal-Free Lyman Limit Systems

    • Dan Weisz (UC Berkeley) colloq. speaker - Photometric Metallicities are the New Black

September 12:

    • Charlotte Bond (WMKO) - Commissioning and first science results of the Keck infrared pyramid wavefront sensor

    • Ivanna Escala (Caltech) - First Iron and Alpha Element Abundances in the Giant Stellar Stream, Outer Disk, and Inner Halo of M31

    • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) colloq. speaker - Advancing Frontiers in Stellar Physics with Astrometry

September 19:

    • Deepthi Gorthi (UC Berkeley) - FFT Correlators: What? Why?

    • Nick Choksi (UC Berkeley) - The mass radius relation of young stellar clusters

    • Matt Dobbs (McGill) colloq. speaker - Undergraduate electronics lab courses

September 26:

    • Kaew Samaporn Tinyanont (Caltech) - Insights into massive star explosions from infrared light

    • Shany Danieli (Yale) - Galaxies missing dark matter

    • Fiona Harrison (Caltech) colloq. speaker - Broadband X-ray measurements of Black Hole Binaries

October 3:

    • Wren Suess & Micah Brush (UC Berkeley) - Respect is Part of Research: Peer-Led Training to Improve Departmental Climate

    • Mike Wong (UC Berkeley) - The HST OPAL Program

    • Bruce Jakosky (Colorado) colloq. speaker joint EPS - Using Venus, Earth, and Mars as constraints on exoplanet atmospheric evolution

October 10: Cancelled due to California Power Outage

    • Yuan Li (UC Berkeley) - Direct Detection of Black Hole-Driven Turbulence in the Centers of Galaxy Clusters

    • Andy Mayo (UC Berkeley) - An 11 Earth-Mass, Long-Period Sub-Neptune Orbiting a Sun-like Star

    • Quinn Konpacky (UCSD) colloq. speaker - A Summer Spent with a Forgotten Dataset

October 17:

    • Chang Hahn (BCCP) - Constraining Star Formation History with the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation

    • Nathan Sandford (UC Berkeley) - Quantifying the Chemical Information Content of Stellar Spectra

    • Paul Schecter (MIT) colloq. speaker - The images of a strongly lensed quasar lie very close to the two (or

    • four) intersections of Witt's hyperbola and Wynne's ellipse

October 24:

    • Sara Jamal (UC Berkeley) - Classification of variables stars using ML/DL

    • Evan Skillman (Minnesota) - The Lowest Metallicity Galaxies and the Primordial He Abundance

    • Suvi Gezari (Maryland) colloq. speaker - When Slumbering Beasts Awake: Extreme Changing-Look Quasars from ZTF

October 31:

    • Miguel Zumalacarregui (UC Berkeley) - Reconciling discrepant values of H_0: hopes & frustrations

    • Kishore Patra (UC Berkeley) - Introduction to spectropolarimetry of supernovae

    • Raffaella Margutti (Northwestern) colloq. speaker - Two years of non-thermal emission from the neutron star merger GW170817: the show is still on

November 7:

    • Yuan Li (UC Berkeley) - Direct Detection of Black Hole-Driven Turbulence in the Centers of Galaxy Clusters

    • Sal Fu (UC Berkeley) - Dynamical Histories of the Crater II Dwarf Galaxy

    • Kunal Mooley (Caltech) colloq. speaker - The First Radio-Discovered Tidal Disruption Event: CNSS J0019+00

November 14:

    • Kareem El-Badry (UC Berkeley) - Separated at birth? An unexpected population of identical-twin binaries

    • Sara Ellison (U. Victoria) colloq. speaker - The Fundamental Metallicity Relation …. Not always fundamental!!

    • Gene Leung (UCSD) - A census of AGN-driven ionized outflows at the cosmic high noon with the MOSDEF survey

November 21:

    • Yi Yang (Weizmann Institute) - Light Echoes Around the Supernova 2014J in M82

    • Casey Lam (UC Berkeley) - 2019 TMT Science Forum Summary

    • Hao Cao (Harvard; joint EPS) colloq. speaker - Dynamics of Jupiter’s deep atmosphere: a continuing enigma?

November 28:

  • Thanksgiving Break

December 5:

    • Ekta Patel (UC Berkeley) - The Orbital Histories of Magellanic Satellites Using Gaia DR2 Proper Motions

    • Amanda Quirk (UCSC) - Asymmetric Drift in Illustris M31 Analogs

    • Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) - Physical Manifestations of Chaos and Regularity Around Galaxies