Spring 2021

3:40 - 4:30 PM (Pacific) every Thursday, location = Zoom

    • 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.

Bold means confirmed

February 4:

    • Chris Agostino (Indiana University) - Physical drivers of emission-line diversity of SDSS AGN with removed star formation contributions

  • Wenbin Lu (Caltech; colloq. speaker) - Three Arguments for the Magnetar Origin of Fast Radio Bursts

February 11:

  • Guy Nir (UC Berkeley) - Satellite flashes as foreground to sub-second transient searches

    • Tom Esposito (UC Berkeley / SETI Instiitute) - Transiting Exoplanet Follow-up by Citizen Scientists with the Global Unistellar eVscope Network

  • Jane Huang (U of Michigan; colloq. speaker) - Insights into the Protoplanetary Disk Mass Problem from High-Resolution Multi-frequency Observations

February 18:

    • Ken Shen (UC Berkeley) - Type Ia Supernova from Detonations of Sub-Chandrasekhar-Mass White Dwarfs: The Tribulations and Triumph of Non-LTE

  • David Vartanyan (UC Berkeley) - Recent Developments in Core-Collapse Supernovae Studies

  • Ben Margalit (UC Berkeley; colloq. speaker) - TBD

February 25:

    • Anna Ho (UC Berkeley) - The routine discovery of optical afterglows without a GRB trigger

    • Michael Jennings (UC Berkeley) - Simulating Super-Jupiter Obliquities

    • Kareem El-Badry (UC Berkeley; colloq. speaker) - Globular cluster populations as tracers of halo assembly

March 4:

    • Ryota Inagaki (UC Berkeley) - Integrating Binary Evolution into SPISEA Stellar Population Modeling Code

    • Siyao Xu (IAS; colloq. speaker) - Astrophysical turbulence: its measurements from the interstellar medium to the intergalactic medium

March 11:

    • Gaspard Duchene (UC Berkeley) - HR 2562: characterizing a debris disk that is dynamically sculpted by a substellar companion

    • Hagai Perets (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology) - A novel channel for GW sources from ultra-wide binaries in the field

March 18 (prospective grad visits):

    • Casey Lam (UC Berkeley) - Status update on the hunt for isolated black holes with microlensing

    • Zoie Telkamp (UC Berkeley) - Developing a physics-aware neural network to generate edge-on protoplanetary disk images

    • Alessandro Savino (UC Berkeley) - The age of the Milky Way inner stellar spheroid from RR Lyrae population synthesis

March 25: UC Berkeley Spring Break

April 1:

    • Jenny Calahan (U. of Michigan) - Determining the 2D Thermal Structure of HD 163296

    • Dick Plambeck (UC Berkeley) - Magnetic Field Structure near the Event Horizon of M87

    • Keming Zhang (UC Berkeley) - Real-Time Likelihood-Free Inference of Roman Binary Microlensing Events

April 8:

    • Yukei Murakami (UC Berkeley) - Tabletop Dark Energy: probing a cosmological scalar field

    • Brittany Miles (UCSC) - Testing a 13μm cutoff HgCdTe Detector for Ground-Based Astronomy

    • Joyce Yen (Washington; colloq. speaker) - Reconceptualizing Mentoring

April 15:

    • Vighnesh Nagpal (UCB) - Precise Dynamical Masses for the HD104304 G-M Binary

    • Mike MacDonald (MIT; colloq. speaker) - Galaxy Cluster Evolution Over the Past 10 Gyr

April 22:

    • Rocio Kiman (CUNI/AMNH) - Age-relations for low-mass stars

    • Karin Oberg (Harvard; colloq. speaker) - Did Jupiter Form in the Outer Solar Nebula?

April 29:

  • David Schlegel (LBL) - DESI Imaging Data Release 9

    • Josh Dillon (UC Berkeley) - First Upper Limits from HERA on the 21 cm Power Spectrum

  • Yiva Goetburg (Carnegie Obs.) - An observational survey of stars stripped in binaries: identification technique and spectral characteristics

May 6 - Exit Talks During the colloquium time starting at 12:40.

NOTES: The March 18 colloquium is by Gibor Basri (but no lunch talk), and on April 1 Jennifer Yee is giving colloquium (but no lunch talk)