Spotlight

Congratulations New PhD's

Six of Astronomy's graduate students have received Doctorates this summer. We congratulate them and wish them the best in their new endeavors. What follows is a picture book of photos from their post-defense celebrations. 

Ekta Patel, May 9.

Deborah Schmidt, July 17.

Ramesh Mainali, July 25.

Junhan Kim, July 29.

David Lesser, July 31. 

Yifan Zhou, August 5. 

More

Recent Steward Ph.D. K. Decker French Wins the ASP's Trumpler Award

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific recently announced that K. Decker French (Ph.D. in 2017 from U.A. Dept. of Astronomy) has been awarded the 2019 Trumpler Award. It is given to "a recent recipient of the Ph.D. degree in North America whose research is considered unusually important to astronomy." 

You can read the A.S.P.'s press release HERE. The Carnegie article is HERE.

While at Arizona, Dr. French worked with Prof. Ann Zabludoff and contributed to a range of astronomical subfields, such as gravitational lensing, galaxy evolution, and the tidal disruption of individual stars by the massive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Her analyses included theoretical simulations, machine learning classifiers, and space- and ground-based imaging and spectroscopy that spanned ultraviolet to radio wavelengths. Dr. French's 2017 Ph.D. dissertation, "New Methods for Tracking Galaxy and Black Hole Evolution using Post-Starburst Galaxies," made important discoveries connecting the global star formation histories of galaxies to their gas content and to their galactic nuclei. She is now a Hubble Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Decker joins an impressive list of Stewardites who have won the Trumpler Award: Jennifer Scott (2005), Jill Bechtold (1988), John Hill (1986), and Gary Schmidt (1979). In addition professors and former professors Gurtina Besla (2013, Harvard), Jim Liebert (1980, Berkeley), and the above-mentioned Jill Bechtold have been so honored.

Congratulations, Decker, from all of us in the Astronomy Dept. and Steward Observatory.

More

WIRED Magazine Talks About Chris Walker's Huge Space Balloon-Telescopes

WIRED Magazine has an article,  HERE, about Chris Walker's "Echo like" space balloon-telescopes. You can read older stories about Dr Walker's projects HERE. You can watch a podcast of a recent talk by Dr Walker HERE.

More

Graduation-Related Photos from Late Spring 2019

Here are six photos covering the College of Science Graduate Students Award Ceremony, the Steward celebration of our graduating majors and minors, our new Phds, and COS graduation itself.

Photo 1   Photo 2    Photo 3   Photo 4   Photo 5   Photo 6

More

Professor Lucy Ziurys Appointed Regents' Professor

UA Professor of  Biochemistry/Chemistry and Astronomy Lucy Ziurys has been appointed to be a Regents' Professor.  The article linked below summarizes some of her many accomplishments, notably her laboratory and observational work on molecules of astrophysical interest. Regents' Professors are a major honor in the State of Arizona University system: they can be no more than 3% of the tenured and tenure-line professors at each of UA and ASU and NAU.  Professor Ziurys joins Professors Roger Angel, W. David Arnett, Xiaohui Fan, George Rieke, Marcia Rieke and Peter Strittmatter as Regents' Professors in our Department. You can read the UA News article HERE.

More

The 2018-2019 UA Astronomy Club

This photo (larger version HERE) is from an early-April meeting of the UA Astronomy Club. This same photo, with everyone numbered, is HERE and a list of attendees at that meeting can be seen HERE. The Astronomy Club meets weekly during the Fall and Spring semesters: more information is available HERE and HERE. 

More