Department Lunch Talk

The Department Lunch Talks are a weekly internal series featuring three 20 minute talks by mainly local scientists, including the scheduled astronomy colloquium speaker.  Subjects often include personal scientific research, reports on other work appearing in journals, education and public outreach efforts, science policy, and professional development issues.

Day and Time: Thursdays at 12:30
Location: 131 Campbell Hall
Organizers: Paul Kalas

Department Lunch Talk Schedule

Fall 2019

Updated 11/05/19. The most up to date version is https://sites.google.com/site/ucbthursdaylunch/fall-2019

12:40 – 1:30 PM every Thursday, location = 131 A & B 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.
  • It is preferred if speakers bring their own laptop, cable adapter (we have some), and pointer.  Presentations may also use the whiteboard.
  • 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

 

August 29: 

  • 1-minute talks from members of the department (UC Berkeley)

September 5: 

  • Keming Zhang (UC Berkeley) –   deepCR: Cosmic Ray Rejection with Deep Learning
  • Nir Mandelker (Yale) – Shattering of Cosmic Sheets due to Thermal Instabilities: a Formation Channel for Metal-Free Lyman Limit Systems
  • Dan Weisz (UC Berkeley) colloq. speaker –  Photometric Metallicities are the New Black

September 12: 

  • Charlotte Bond (WMKO) – Commissioning and first science results of the Keck infrared pyramid wavefront sensor
  • Ivanna Escala (Caltech) – First Iron and Alpha Element Abundances in the Giant Stellar Stream, Outer Disk, and Inner Halo of M31
  • Jessica Lu (UC Berkeley) colloq. speaker –  Advancing Frontiers in Stellar Physics with Astrometry

September 19: 

  • Deepthi Gorthi (UC Berkeley) – FFT Correlators: What? Why?
  • Nick Choksi (UC Berkeley) – The mass radius relation of young stellar clusters
  • Matt Dobbs (McGill) colloq. speaker –  Undergraduate electronics lab courses

September 26: 

  • Kaew Samaporn Tinyanont (Caltech) – Insights into massive star explosions from infrared light
  • Shany Danieli (Yale) – Galaxies missing dark matter
  • Fiona Harrison (Caltech) colloq. speaker –  Broadband X-ray measurements of Black Hole Binaries

October 3: 

  • Wren Suess & Micah Brush (UC Berkeley) – Respect is Part of Research: Peer-Led Training to Improve Departmental Climate
  • Mike Wong (UC Berkeley) – The HST OPAL Program 
  • Bruce Jakosky (Colorado) colloq. speaker joint EPS –  Using Venus, Earth, and Mars as constraints on exoplanet atmospheric evolution

October 10: Cancelled due to California Power Outage

  • Yuan Li (UC Berkeley) – Direct Detection of Black Hole-Driven Turbulence in the Centers of Galaxy Clusters
  • Andy Mayo (UC Berkeley) – An 11 Earth-Mass, Long-Period Sub-Neptune Orbiting a Sun-like Star
  • Quinn Konpacky (UCSD) colloq. speaker – A Summer Spent with a Forgotten Dataset

October 17: 

  • Chang Hahn (BCCP) – Constraining Star Formation History with the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation
  • Nathan Sandford (UC Berkeley) – Quantifying the Chemical Information Content of Stellar Spectra
  • Paul Schecter (MIT) colloq. speaker –  The images of a strongly lensed quasar lie very close to the two (or
    four) intersections of Witt’s hyperbola and Wynne’s ellipse

October 24: 

  • Sara Jamal (UC Berkeley) –  Classification of variables stars using ML/DL
  • Evan Skillman (Minnesota) – The Lowest Metallicity Galaxies and the Primordial He Abundance
  • Suvi Gezari (Maryland) colloq. speaker –  When Slumbering Beasts Awake: Extreme Changing-Look Quasars from ZTF

October 31: 

  • Miguel Zumalacarregui (UC Berkeley) – Reconciling discrepant values of H_0: hopes & frustrations
  • Kishore Patra (UC Berkeley) – Introduction to spectropolarimetry of supernovae
  • Raffaella Margutti (Northwestern) colloq. speaker –  Two years of non-thermal emission from the neutron star merger GW170817: the show is still on

November 7: 

  • Yuan Li (UC Berkeley) – Direct Detection of Black Hole-Driven Turbulence in the Centers of Galaxy Clusters
  • Sal Fu (UC Berkeley) – Dynamical Histories of the Crater II Dwarf Galaxy
  • Kunal Mooley (Caltech) colloq. speaker –  The First Radio-Discovered Tidal Disruption Event: CNSS J0019+00

November 14: 

  • Kareem El-Badry (UC Berkeley) – TBD
  • Gene Leung (TBD) – TBD
  • Sara Ellison (U. Victoria) colloq. speaker –  TBD

November 21: 

  • Yi Yang (Weizmann Institute) – TBD
  • M. Wong (UC Berkeley) – 2019 TMT Science Forum Summary
  • Hao Cao (Harvard; joint EPS) colloq. speaker –  TBD

November 28: 

  • Thanksgiving Break

December 5: 

  • Ekta Patel (UC Berkeley) – TBD
  • Amanda Quirk (UCSC) – TBD
  • Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) – TBD