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” (12:40–1:30)
Location: 131 Campbell Hall (rooms A & B)
Organizers: Luke Kelley

To volunteer for a talk, please e-mail Luke (LZKelley  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 Luke to facilitate scheduling their talk.

Speakers are recommended to bring their own laptop, cable adapter (although we have some), and pointer.  Presentations may also use the whiteboard.  Please contact Luke ahead of time for any special accommodations.

Department Lunch Talk Schedule

Fall 2023

Updated 2023/08/10.  Bold means confirmed.

August 24:

  • 1-slide 1-minute talks

August 31:

  • Andrea Antoni (Berkeley): IIp or Not IIP: Modeling Weak Explosions of Red Supergiants
  • Lorenzo Sironi (Colombia): To B or not to B: unveiling the origin of magnetic fields in the Universe

September 07:

  • Anne Noer Kolborg (UC Santa Cruz): Constraining r-process production through metal mixing
  • Vikram Ravi (Caltech): The 2000-antenna Deep Synoptic Array (DSA-2000) radio camera

September 14:

  • Sal Fu (Berkeley): Metallicity Distribution Functions of Local Group Dwarf Galaxies from Hubble Space Telescope Narrow-band Imaging
  • Jonathan Tan (U Virginia): Supermassive black hole formation from Pop III.1 protostars
  • Ting Li (Toronto): Milky Way’s Least-massive Satellites: Ultra-faint Globular Clusters or Extremely Compact Dwarf Galaxies?

September 21:

  • James Sullivan (Berkeley) – New Aspects of Local Primordial non-Gaussianity in Galaxy Surveys
  • Aaron Tohuvavohu (Toronto) – A Future of Abundant Space Telescopes
  • Ken Shen (Berkeley)

September 28:

  • Kishore Patra (Berkeley) – Constraints on the quasi-periodic eruptions in GSN 069
  • Emiko Gardiner (Berkeley) – Beyond the Background: Gravitational Wave Anisotropy and Continuous Waves from Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
  • Maria Drout (Toronto) – A Search for Yellow Supergiant Binaries: Towards a Population of Supernova Progenitor Analogs

October 05:

  • Alessandro Savino (Berkeley) – Star formation and quenching in the ultra-faint dwarfs satellites of M31
  • Wenbin Lu (Berkeley) – Precessing jets in tidal disruption events are choked by disk wind
  • Masaru Shibata (Max Planck) – Exploring the collapsar scenarios in numerical relativity

October 12:

  • Jennifer Bergner (Berkeley) – Accelerating `Oumuamua with radiolytically produced H2
  • Richie Wang (Stanford) – Towards a unified model for dwarf galaxy formation with UniverseMachine
  • Allyson Sheffield (CUNY LaGuardia) – Connecting Stellar Streams in Gaia

October 19:

  • Lachlan T. Lancaster (Columbia) – What Pops the Wind-Blown Bubble
  • Chema Palencia (IFCA Spain) – Extremely Magnified Stars: Probing High-z Stars and Compact Dark Matter
  • Yuhan Yao (Berkeley) – Tidal Disruption Event Demographics with the Zwicky Transient Facility

October 26:

  • Sanchit Sabhlok (UC San Diego) – Circumgalactic Environments around z=2 radio loud quasars
  • Danielle Frostig (MIT) – WINTER: a new near-IR time-domain survey facility
  • Jessica Lu (Berkeley) – Finding Black Holes with the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope

November 02:

  • Anna Pusack (Berkeley) – The Galactic Center: Analysis of NIRSpec IFU data in crowded fields
  • Maude Gull (Berkeley) – Massive Metal-Poor Stars in Leo A
  • Kate Alexander (U Arizona) – The Paradigm-Altering Jet of GRB 221009A (“The BOAT”)

November 09:

  • Sophia Risin (Berkeley): TDEs from Second Generation Mergers
  • Mason Ng (MIT): Multifaceted Understanding of Accreting Neutron stars and their Environments: An X-ray Polarimetric Focus
  • Ewan Douglas (U Arizona): How we built this: on the physics and techniques required to reach ultra-high contrasts

November 16:

  • Macy Huston (Berkeley) – Microlensing & the Structure of the Milky Way
  • Vighnesh Nagpal (Berkeley) – Breaking Giant Chains: Early Stage Instabilities in Long-Period Giant Planet Systems
  • Karin Sandstrom (UC San Diego) – Molecular Gas Star Formation Efficiency and the CO-to-H2 Conversion Factor

November 23:

  • Thanksgiving day, no meeting

November 30:

  • Howard Isaacson (Berkeley): A Survey of Chromospheric Activity Through the Lens of Precise Stellar Properties
  • Lingyuan Ji (Berkeley): Observability of lensed gravitational waves from massive black hole binaries with LISA
  • Erik Petigura (UC Los Angeles): Automated Scheduling of Doppler Observations and the Traveling Telescope Problem

 

Past Talk Schedules