Participants:
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Alex Filippenko
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Alex Filippenko is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from
Caltech in 1984 and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1986. His primary areas of research are exploding stars, active galaxies,
black holes, and the expansion of the Universe; he has coauthored over 400 publications on these topics. He has won numerous
awards for his teaching and research, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1998 he produced a 40-lecture video course
on introductory astronomy with The Teaching Company; a 16-lecture update will be available this November. In 2001 he
coauthored an award-winning introductory astronomy textbook, the second edition of which was recently published.
He has served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and Councilor of the American Astronomical Society.
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Christopher Gerardy
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Chris recieved his PhD from Dartmouth College in 2002, and has been a McDonald
Postdoctoral fellow at UT since October. Primarily an observer, he works
closely with members of the UT theory group to develop and utilize observational
tools for probing the physics and phenomenology of stellar explosions. His
research interests include the details and mechanisms of the supernova
explosions, molecule and dust formation in supernovae ejecta, interaction with
the circumstellar environment, and the connection between supernovae and
supernova remnants.
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Thomas Greathouse
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Thomas Greathouse is in his final year of graduate school working towards a PhD from UT. His work has been split between
mid-infrared instrumentation and Planetary Science. He was an integral part of the completion of TEXES, the Texas Echelon
Cross Echelle Spectrograph, designed and built here at UT by Dr. John Lacy. He now spends most of his time supporting
TEXES and modeling his own data taken using TEXES. His planetary science interest has remained focused on the temperature
and composition of the stratospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and how those quantities vary with position and time.
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Sheila Kannappan
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Sheila Kannappan is a Harlan Smith Postdoctoral Fellow at UT. She received a PhD in Physics and an MA in History of Science from
Harvard in 2001. Her research focuses on galaxy evolution, using the physical parameters that control the scatter and wavelength
dependence of dynamical scaling relations to investigate star formation histories, dark matter content, and evidence for evolution
in high-z scaling relations. She also uses direct detection methods to try to catch bulges and disks in the act of forming at
low redshift, with the goal of distinguishing between models for how these galaxies form.
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David Lambert
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David L. Lambert is the current Director of the McDonald Observatory and holds the Isabel McCutcheon Harte Centennial Chair in
Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born and educated in England and obtained a B. A. in Physics (1960) and a
D. Phil. (1965) in solar physics from the University of Oxford. His contributions to reasearch in astronomical spectroscopy have
been recognized with numerous prestigious awards and appointments including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
(1980-81) and the Dannie Heineman prize for Astrophysics by the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical
Society for "establishing a new standard of precision for the quantitative analysis of stellar spectra." In 35 years of research
in astronomical spectroscopy, Lambert has published 400 papers covering a wide range of topics: the chemical composition
of the Sun, the emission line spectra of comets, the identification of absorption and emission lines in astronomical spectra,
and the chemical composition of stars. His current research emphasizes precise analyses of the composition of evolved stars
to determine how the chemical elements are synthesized by stars, and studies of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy as
revealed by the chemical composition of unevolved (i. e. unmixed) stars.
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Michael Liu
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Michael Liu is an Assistant Astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He received his PhD at UC
Berkeley in 2000. Since then, he has been a Beatrice Watson Parrent Fellow and (from 2003) a Hubble Fellow at Hawaii. His
current research focuses on understanding the physical nature and origin of substellar objects. He is involved in searches
for young exoplanets using ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics, in spectroscopic investigations of young brown
dwarfs, and in studies of the circumstellar disks of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs.
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Gabriela Mallen-Ornelas
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Gabriela Mallen-Ornelas is a Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She received her PhD in 1999 from
the University of Toronto working with Simon Lilly on the internal kinematics of high-z galaxies. From 1999 to 2002, she was a
Princeton-Catolica Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Princeton and the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile. He primary research
nterest is the detection and characterization of extrasolar planets using the transit method. The EXPLORE planet search is
looking for eclipses by giant planets towards thousands of target stars.
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Brenda Matthews
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Brenda Matthews is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the BIMA project in the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at UC Berkeley. She
completed her PhD thesis at McMaster University in 2001 under the direction of Christine Wilson. Her work is concentrated
in a few areas of star formation research. A main thread has been the study of magnetic fields to determine the role of these
fields in the support of molecular clouds and the regulation of star formation. Other areas of interest include the use of line
polarimetry to study field geometries in protostellar outflows, the search for debris disks around nearby stars, and spectroscopic
studies of preprotostellar and protostellar cores.
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