Spring 2022

12:40 - 1:30 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

January 27 - zoom only

  • Wenbin Lu (UC Berkeley) - Rapid Binary Mass Transfer

  • Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State University) - NASA's Neurodiversity Network: Creating Inclusive Informal Learning Across the Spectrum

February 3

  • Nils Deppe (Caltech) - Taming the Extreme: Improvements for high-spin binary black hole merger simulations

February 10

  • Steve Lubow (STScI) - Polar Planets Around Eccentric Orbit Binaries

  • Maria Okounkova (Flatiron Institute) -Gravitational wave astronomy: high mass-ratio systems

February 17

  • Shrihan Agarwal (UC Berkeley) - Hunting for Black Holes with Gravitational Microlensing

  • Maya Fishbach (Northwestern) - Comparing populations of black holes in gravitational-wave sources and X-ray binaries

February 24

  • Aliza Beverage (UC Berkeley) - The Elemental Abundances of Quiescent Galaxies over Cosmic Time

  • Jane Huang (University of Michigan) -Insights into the Evolution of Protostellar Systems from Wideband Millimeter Interferometry

March 3

  • Andy Mayo (UC Berkeley) - Enriching Our View of Multiplanet Systems With High-Cadence Observations of 914 TESS Targets

  • Natasha Abrams (UC Berkeley) - Assessing the Impact of Binary Systems on Microlensing

  • Seiji Fujimoto (Niels Bohr Institute) - A dusty, compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn

March 10

  • Lister Chen (UC Berkeley) - Using Deep Learning to Identify RFI in HERA Data

  • Jacob Pilawa (UC Berkeley) - Dynamical Mass Measurements of Massive Elliptical Galaxies

  • Guðmundur Stefansson (Princeton) - Towards Space-Quality Photometry from the Ground with Engineered Diffusers

March 17

  • Wynn Jacobson-Galán (UC Berkeley) - The Circumstellar Environments of Calcium-rich Transients

  • Dan Werthimer (UC Berkeley) - The PANOSETI Transient Search

  • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) - The Galactic Center with JWST

March 24: Spring Break

March 31

  • Zeljko Ivezic (UW) - Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time: the greatest movie of all time!

April 7

  • Antonella Palmese (UC Berkeley) - LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA binary black hole mergers and galaxies’ central black holes

April 14

  • Akshay Suresh (Cornell / Breakthrough Listen) - 4 – 8 GHz Searches for Galactic Center Pulsars

  • Matt Hosek (UCLA) - The Orbits of the Arches and Quintuplet Clusters: Exploring Scenarios for Star Formation Near the Galactic Center

April 21

  • Canceled

  • Canceled

April 28

  • Steven Giacalone (UC Berkeley) - Probing the Landscape of Sub-Jovian Planets around A-type Stars with TESS

  • Hannah Gulick (UC Berkeley) - CuRIOS: CubeSats for Rapid Infrared and Optical Surveys

  • Maude Gull (UC Berkeley) - A Panochromatic Census of Massive Stars in the Extremely Metal-Poor Galaxy Leo A

May 5

  • Eden McEwen (UC Berkeley) - A wavelength analysis of ‘imaka: a Ground Layer adaptive optics demonstrator for wide fields of view