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.

Spring 2024 Schedule

January 25

David Jewitt (UCLA)

February 01

Adam Burgasser (UCSD) – Toward Community Astronomy: Collaborations with Indigenous Communities in California, Hawaii, and the Americas (recommended reading: Chapter 3 of the Astro2020 decadal report, and especially section 3.4.1 [pp 113-118])
1-slide 1-minute talks – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Outreach

February 08

Lia Medeiros (IAS) – Probing Gravitational Physics with the Event Horizon Telescope
Jessica Lu (Berkeley) – The Visible Universe at High Resolution in the Post-HST Era

February 15 – No meeting

February 22

Scott Ransom (NRAO/UVA) – New Exotic and Massive Pulsars in Globular Clusters
Manish Ravi (Berkeley) –
Jackie Blaum (Berkeley) – A Catalog of Masses and Radii for ~90 MS+MS Ellipsoidal Variables

February 29

Natalie Batalha (UCSC) – Open Science Practices: a case study of the JWST transiting exoplanet community (JTEC)
Alessandro Savino (Berkeley) – Benchmarking JWST/NIRCam performance on point-source photometry: impacts on program design

March 07

Stella Ocker (Caltech) – Cosmic Plasmas from AU to Gigaparsec Scales
Natalie LeBaron (Berkeley) –

March 14

Ashley Villar (Harvard) – Are collapsars a site of r-process nucleosynthesis?
Dave Russell (NYU Abu Dhabi) – What initiates outbursts of black hole X-ray binaries?
Liang Dai (Berkeley) – Large samples of unresolved radio galaxy polarizations as a new probe of cosmic birefringence

March 21

Adam Riess (STSci) – Alternative Primary Distance Indicators at the Top of the HR Diagram
Ramanakumar Sankar (Berkeley) – The deep, convective Jovian atmosphere
Dan Weisz (Berkeley) – The Ultra-Violet Explorer (UVEX)

March 28 – spring recess

April 04 – april APS meeting

April 11

~~Christoph Baranec (Hawaii) –~~
Francisco Nogueras Lara (ESO Garching) – Hunting young stars in the Galactic center. Detecting stellar nurseries in Sagittarius B1 and C
Eli Wiston (Berkeley) – The Late-Time Radio Emission of Supernova

April 18

David Radice (PSU) – Accretion Induced Collapse of White Dwarfs
Alice P. Curtin (McGill) – Constraining FRB-like Emission from SGRBs using CHIME/FRB
Cooper Jacobus (Berkeley) – Reconstructing the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe with Deep Learning