Department Lunch Talks

Weekly talk series with three 12+4 minute talks, typically featuring two local scientists and the scheduled astronomy colloquium speaker.  Subjects include not only personal scientific research, but also arXiv/journal-club style reports, education and public outreach efforts, science policy, and professional development issues.

Day and Time: Thursdays at 12:30 (Berkeley time, so 12:40–1:30). **Note that from Jan 29 to Feb 26, the talks will be held at 3:30-4:30PM (Berkeley time).**
Location: 131 Campbell Hall (rooms A & B)
Organizer: Ryan Chornock

To volunteer for a talk, please e-mail Ryan (chornock@berkeley.edu).  Berkeley graduate students and postdocs are given priority for talks, but visiting scientists and collaborators are also welcome to present.  Visitors should have their local hosts contact Ryan to facilitate scheduling their talk.

Speakers are recommended to bring their own laptop, pointer, and, if necessary, a cable adapter (we have HDMI and USB-C).  Presentations may also use the whiteboard.  Please contact Ryan ahead of time for any special accommodations.

Spring 2026 Schedule


January 22

  • Gongjie Li (Georgia Tech) -- Unified Formation Channel of Hot and Warm Jupiters via Planet-Planet Scattering
  • DEIC Committee Presentations

January 29 [3:30 PM]

  • Canceled

February 5 [3:30 PM]

  • Assaf Horesh (HUJI) – The radio awakens - a new phenomenon in TDEs

February 12 [3:30 PM]

  • Canceled

February 19 [3:30 PM]

  • Mohammad Farhat (Berkeley) – Death and Dearth of Circumbinary Planets

  • Paul Kalas (Berkeley) – Fomalhaut strikes back: Giant impacts light up an extrasolar planetary system

February 26 [3:30 PM]

  • Gregoire Aufort (Berkeley) – Beyond MCMC: Bayesian Computations for the Large-Survey Era
  • Vishal Gajjar (Berkeley) – Discovery of BLPSR: a candidate millisecond pulsar at the Galactic Center

March 5

  • Yixian Chen (Princeton) –  Appearance of star-forming, self-gravitating AGN disks and connection to Little Red Dots
  • Isabel Angelo (SETI) – Searching for Anomalous Transiting Objects in TESS

March 12

  • Courtney Dressing (Berkeley) – Taking a Census of Nearby Planetary Systems
  • Sunny Rhoades (UC Davis) – Spatially-Resolved Kinematics of Lensed Galaxies at Cosmic Noon
  • Stephen Taylor (Vanderbilt) – Reaching Diffraction-limited Localization of Gravitational-wave Signals with Pulsar Timing Arrays

March 19

  • Natalie Green (Berkeley) – Protoplanetary disk chemistry as seen by the ALMA DECO Large Program
  • Ziwei Ding (Purdue) – 3D Reconstruction of the Crab Nebula

  • Stella Offner (Texas) – Modeling the Impact of Cosmic Rays on Star Formation: Clouds, Cores and Disks

March 26

  • [No talks -- spring break]

April 2

  • Christian Hellum Bye (Berkeley) – 21-cm Cosmology with EIGSEP
  • Liam Connor (Harvard) – Learning based superresolution imaging for radio interferometers

April 9

  • Yifei Luo (LBNL) – Constraining the Galaxy-Halo Connection in Low-Mass Galaxies with Large Imaging and Spectroscopic Surveys
  • Tamojeet Roychowdhury (Berkeley) – Probing Cosmic Reionisation on Local Scales with Lyman-alpha Spectroscopy
  • Xiaohui Fan (Arizona) – Colloquium Speaker

April 16

  • Natasha Abrams (Berkeley) – Probing Binaries with Photometric and Astrometric Microlensing
  • Wenbin Lu (Berkeley) – Fast X-ray transients from off-axis jet cocoons
  • Clément Bonnerot (Birmingham) – The impact of magnetic fields during tidal disruption events

April 23

  • Samuel Whitebook (Caltech) – The Discovery of Stable Mass Transfer Between Brown Dwarfs
  • Jessica Lu (Berkeley) – Hunting for Black Holes with Roman

  • Grace Telford (Utah) – Molecular hydrogen in the extremely metal- and dust-poor galaxy Leo P

April 30

  • Itai Sfaradi (Berkeley) – What drives the radio and X-ray re-brightening of a decade old relativistic SN?
  • Savannah Cary (Berkeley) – An engine model for LFBOTs

  • Mathieu Renzo (Arizona) – Colloquium Speaker

May 7

  • Exit talks (Hannah Gulick, Caleb Harada)

May 14

  • Exit talks (Kenneth Lin, Tyler Cox)