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: Paul Kalas

To volunteer for a talk, please e-mail Paul (kalas@astro.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 Paul 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.

Fall 2026 Schedule

September 3

  • Eli Wiston (Berkeley) – “Department Outreach Opportunities”

  • Aashish Gupta (University of Virginia) – "Environmental Interactions: A Paradigm Shift in Planet Formation”

  • Pradip Gatkine (UCLA) – "Near-IR interferometry and nulling enabled by astrophotonics"

September 10

  • Nicole Flors (Northwestern) - "Millisecond Pulsars Flying Through Gas with GRMHD."

  • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) - “Roman Launches!  What's next?”

  • Kaitlin Kratter (Arizona) – colloquium speaker, "An Analytic Model for Gravitational Instability at Q>1"An Analytic Model for Gravitational Instability at Q>1

 September 11

  • Astronomy Department 1-minute Talks

September 17

  • Aster Taylor (U of M, Jenny Bergner) – "The Age Distribution of Interstellar Objects and Galactic Planet Formation"

  • Callumn Donnan (NOIRLab, host Dan Stark) – "The nature of star-formation in the first galaxies as revealed by JWST spectroscopy"

  • Alice Shapley (UCLA)  – Unprecedented Probes of Gas Flows at High Redshift

September 24

  • Pranav Nagarajan (Caltech, host Jessica Lu) – ""The Curious Case of PSR J1928+1815: An Eclipsing Millisecond Pulsar with a Mysterious Companion

  • "Cheyenne Shariat (Caltech, host Dan Weisz) – "How Stellar Companions Shape the Orbits of Hot Jupiters

  • Kyle Kremer (UCSD) – Searching for Black Holes in Globular Clusters using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager

 October 1

  • Eliza Diggins (UC Berkeley) – Extreme Dispersion FRBs and where to find them

  • Wenbin Lu (UC Berkeley) – Are Little Red Dots Supermassive Stars?

  • Andrew Mummery (IAS) – Taking the plunge: how fast are stellar mass black holes really spinning?

October 8

  • Daniel Brethauer (UC Berkeley) – "Free Neutrons in Kilonova Ejecta: X-ray and UV Flashes"

  • Yvette Cendes (Oregon U) – "On the Discovery of Radio Emission from the Exoplanet Beta Pictoris b"

  • Mike Boylan-Kochin (UT Austin) – What’s Old Is New Again: Globular Clusters As Cosmological Constraints

October 15

  • Brant Roberson (UCSC) – colloquium speaker

October 22

  • Howard Hao-Tse Huang (UC Berkeley) –

  • Derek Perera (U Minnesota, Alex Filippenko hosting) - 

  • Malena Rice (Yale) – colloquium speaker

October 29

  • Natasha Abrams (UC Berkeley) –

  • Anil Seth (Utah) – colloquium speaker

November 5

  • Himansh Rathore (U of A, host Dan Stark) –

  • Simon Smith (U Victoria, host Dan Weisz) –

  • David Charbonneau (Harvard) – colloquium speaker

November 12

  • Abby Mintz (Princeton, host Dan Weisz) –

  • Sarah Millholland (MIT) – colloquium speaker

November 19

  • Anna Pusack (UC Berkeley) –

  • Olivia Apregren (UC Berkeley) –

  • Jim Fuller (Caltech) – colloquium speaker

December 3

  • Sara Rosborough  (Texas A&M , host Chung-Pei) –

  • Nicole Ford (McGill, host Tamojeet Roychowdhury) – "A  Sub-Parsec Hornet’s Nest of Gas, Dust, and Stars: Ionization Structure & Metal Enrichment of the Galactic Center Minispiral Observed with JWST”

  • Alyssa Goodman (Harvard) – colloquium speaker