Fall 2021

3:40 - 4:30 PM (Pacific) every Thursday, location = 131 Campbell Hall

To volunteer for a 12 minute talk + 4 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.

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

Note that the projector will fill the screen and make slides easier to read if a 16:9 format is used.

Bold means confirmed

September 2

  • 1-minute Talks

September 9

  • Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley) - Hubble Tension in the Accelerating Universe

  • Danielle Berg (UT Austin) - Directly Observing the Role of O/Fe-Enhancements in Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxies

September 16

  • David Vartanyan (UC Berkeley) - Progenitors and Predestination in Core-Collapse Supernovae

  • Sam Rose (UC Berkeley) - Exploring the Complex Circumstellar Environment of Red Supergiant VY CMa

  • Steve Furlanetto (UCLA) - Luminosity Functions and Large-Scale Structure During the Cosmic Dawn

September 23

  • Wynn Jacobson-Galan (UC Berkeley) - Watching a Red Supergiant Explode with the Young Supernova Experiment

  • Philipp Kempski (UC Berkeley) - Mysterious Cosmic Ray Propagation and Feedback

  • Dan Scolnic (Duke) - Planning the Upcoming LSST and Roman Surveys

September 30

  • Sean Terry (UCB) - Direct Mass Measurements for Microlensing Exoplanets

  • Namrata Roy (UCSC) - Feeding and feedback via large-scale AGN winds in nearby galaxies

  • Shri Kulkarni (Caltech) - What does the Dispersion Measure (DM) measure?

October 7

  • Vighnesh Nagpal (UC Berkeley) - New results for the eccentricity distribution of imaged giant planets

  • Matt Siebert (UCSC) - Improving Cosmological Utility of Type Ia Supernovae through Physics and Big Data

  • Anna Ho (UC Berkeley) - Finding low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts as fast optical transients

October 14

  • Grecco Oyarzun (UCSC) - Probing hierarchical galaxy formation with SDSS-IV MaNGA

  • Kaveh Pahlevan (SETI Institute) - New perspectives on the origin of the lunar inclination

October 21

  • Casey Lam (UC Berkeley) - Searching for isolated black holes with astrometric microlensing using HST

  • Kishore Patra (UC Berkeley) - The "remarkably unremarkable" Type Ia SN 2019ein

October 28

  • James Sullivan (UC Berkeley) - Modeling small-scale large-scale structure with hybrid halo perturbation theory

  • Lisa Hunter (UCSC) - Mentoring the Akamai Way: Designing a Student Project Experience

November 4

  • Kaley Virginia Brauer (MIT) - Studying the Tiniest Galaxies in the Milky Way’s Assembly History through Chemical Tagging and Kinematics

  • Gibor Basri (UC Berkeley) - A New Autocorrelation Method for Determining Starspot Lifetimes

  • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) - Summary and Discussion of the Decadal Review

November 11

  • Veteran's Day

November 18

  • Andrea Antoni (UC Berkeley) - Random Angular Momentum in Convection: Implications for Supergiant Collapse to Form Black Holes

  • Zhuo Chen (UCLA) - A new window on star formation history at the Galactic Center

  • Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz (UCSC) - Metal enrichment by turbulent mixing and its imprints on metal poor stars in the Milky Way.

December 2

  • Kemin Zhang (UC Berkeley) - A Ubiquitous Unifying Degeneracy for 2-Body Microlensing Systems

  • Emma Turtelboom (UC Berkeley) - TOI 1246: Mass Measurements for Four Transiting sub-Neptunes