David Aguilera Dena
David R. Aguilera-Dena did his undergrad studies in Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he worked with Dr. Fabio De Colle and Dr. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. His bachelor thesis work comprised a numerical and analytical study of the synchrotron emission from relativistic supernovae, to better understand their dynamical properties and the density distribution in their circumstellar medium. He then obtained a MSc degree as a member of the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy. In his thesis work, supervised by Dr. Norbert Langer, he studied the evolution of massive, rotating stars at low metallicity, finding that, due to their rotationally enhanced mass loss and neutrino driven contraction, they are suitable progenitors for type I superluminous supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.
David will remain under the supervision of Dr. Norbert Langer for his PhD, studying the evolution of massive single and binary stars, trying to relate their physical properties to the supernova explosions and/or gamma-ray bursts that occur at the end of their lives.
Country of origin: Mexico
Starting at the IMPRS: 02/2018
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Norbert Langer
Expertise: Computational astrophysics, Fortran, Python, LaTeX
Address: AIfA, Room 3.012, e-mail: davidrad@astro.uni-bonn.de
David Aguilera Dena
Davit Alkhanishvili
Davit Alkhanishvili did his undergraduate work at the Tbilisi State University (TSU) at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, Republic of Georgia. In his Bachelor thesis he studied the dispersion relation for liquid Helium. Davit’s Master work was done at University of Bonn within Argelander Institute for Astronomy (AIfA) in the group of Prof. Cristiano Porciani. The thesis was aimed at studying the theoretical models for dark matter bispectrum, the statistic used in galaxy surveys to constrain the cosmological parameters of the Universe.
Davit is continuing his PhD work at the AIfA in the group of Prof. Cristiano Porciani. He studies the Large Scale Structure, galaxy clustering and different cosmological models with the upcoming Euclid mission.
Country of origin: Georgia
Starting at the IMPRS: 10/2018
Thesis advisor: Cristiano Porciani
Expertise: Fortran, Matlab, Python
Address: AIfA, Room 1.024, Phone 0228 733433, e-mail: daalkh (at) astro.uni-bonn.de
Davit Alkhanshvili
Tilemachos
Tilemachos Athanasiadis studied physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. His thesis, under
the supervision of Prof. Nikolaos Stergioulas, was a study of orbits around neutron stars in scalar tensor theories of gravity.
The value of the calculations of the so-called epicyclic frequencies, in accretion disks around non-rotating neutron stars,
lies in the effort to explain quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs). He also worked with Prof. John Seiradakis on an
observational study of the heating of the solar corona and he was involved into projects related with instrumentation and electronics.
He is currently working on targeted surveys for pulsars and especially for neutron star-white dwarf binaries, systems that are
ideal for precise neutron star mass measurements.
Country of origin: Greece
Starting at the IMPRS: 02/2017
Title of Thesis: Targeted surveys for pulsars
Thesis Supervisor/Advisor: M. Kramer / J. Antoniadis
Google Scholar Profile: https://scholar.google.gr/citations?user=u2mRsmIAAAAJ&hl=en
Address: MPIfR, Room: E 0.05.1
email: tilemathan (at) mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Tilemachos Athanasiadis
Vishnu Balakrishnan
Vishnu Balakrishnan did his undergraduate studies in Physics at Christ University in India. In the spring of 2014, he worked with Prof. Dr. Stalin C.S. of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. There he worked on Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxies using data from the Sloan Digital Sky survey. He joined the University of Bonn in October 2014 to do his masters in Astrophysics. He did his master thesis on “Multi-Frequency Radio Observations of the COSMOS field” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi and Dr. Hans Klöckner. The master thesis focused on working with Metre-wavelength observations of the COSMOS field using the Giant Metrewave Radio telescope (GMRT). He worked on calibration, imaging methods using AIPS, ParselTongue. Additionally, he also developed tools to calculate spectral age of extended radio sources.
Vishnu is currently part of the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy group led by Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer. He is working on developing new techniques based on neural nets for pulsar searching in the HTRU-South Survey.
Country of origin: India
Starting at the IMPRS: 08/2017
Title of the thesis: “Searching for Radio Pulsars using Parkes telescope.”
Thesis advisor: Dr. David Champion, Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Address: MPIFR, Room 0.06
Expertise: Python, C++, bash/tcsh, AIPS, SIGPROC
Vishnu Balakrishnan
Ivalu Barlach
Ivalu Barlach Christensen obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2018. She went on to study her master’s degree in astrophysics at Lund University, Sweden, working on her thesis titled “Accurate Abundances of Giant Stars in the Local Disk – A Manual Analysis of IR APOGEE Spectra”, supervised by Dr. Nils Ryde and Dr. Henrik Jönsson.
She started her PhD in the Millimeter and Submillimeter astronomy group at MPIfR in August 2020. Her PhD is investigating the chemistry of star-forming regions, supervised by Prof. Dr. Karl Menten.
Country of origin: Greenland
Starting at the IMPRS: August 2020
Title of thesis: Investigating the chemistry in star-forming regions
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten
Expertise: Python, CASA, Cassis, Spectroscopy Made Easy
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.50, Phone: 0228 525105
E-mail: ibarlach@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Ivalu Barlach
Ivana Beslic
Ivana Beslic
Harshitha Bhat
Harshitha Bhat
Laure Bouscasse
Laure Bouscasse
Nina Brinkmann
Nina Brinkmann studied Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Bonn and investigated the dynamical evolution of young star clusters for her thesis “Nbody models: the efficiency of forming bound clusters” at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kroupa and Dr. Banerjee.
She evaluated simulations of embedded young star clusters undergoing gas expulsion, trying to assess the amount of initial stellar content that survives this explosive process and to what extent several physical parameters influence the outcome.
In August 2015 she joined the Millimeter and Submillimeter Astronomy group at the MPIfR for her PHD studies. She currently analyses emission of the nearby Orion Molecular Cloud 1 star forming region obtained with the APEX telescope to develop a point of reference for more distant molecular clouds and even molecular gas content of other galaxies. To this she will help to commission and subsequently use the LAsMA heterodyne array, which will make imaging surveys of these distant molecular clouds feasible.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 01/2016
Title of thesis: “The physical and chemical conditions of molecular clouds on large scales”
Thesis advisors: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten, Dr. Friedrich Wyrowski
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.39, Phone +49 228 525468, email: brinkmann(at)mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Nina Brinkmann
Laura Ann Busch
Laura Ann Busch obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Physics and her Master’s degree in Astrophysics at the University of Bonn. In the summer of 2018 she joined the Millimeter/Submilliter group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio astronomy (MPIfR) as an research intern under supervision of Dr. Arnaud Belloche. During this time she analysed interferometric data taken with ALMA towards the first hydrostatic core candidate Chamaeleon MMS1. With the detection of a fast-moving outflow driven by the young stellar object, she could classify it as a Class 0 protostar. This internship was concluded with Laura’s first publication.
Laura stayed in the submm/mm group to write her MSc Thesis under supervision of Prof. Dr. Karl Menten and Dr. Denise Riquelme. In the course of her thesis, Laura reduced and analysed spectral line data observed with the IRAM 30m and the APEX telescopes towards the 1.3 and 1.6 cloud complexes, which are located in the Galactic centre. She investigated the morphology and performed excitation studies using various molecules in order to derive physical properties, such as density and kinetic temperature, and chemical composition of the gas in the two sources.
In March 2020 Laura started her PhD as an IMPRS student under supervision of Prof. Dr. Menten and Dr. Belloche. She analyses inteferometric data observed in the course of the ReMoCA (Re-Exploring Molecular Complexity with ALMA) survey towards the star-forming region Sagittarius B2(N) and investigates the distribution of complex organic molecules in the closest environment of the massive protostars in Sgr B2(N).
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 03/2020
Title of thesis: “Interferometric studies on Sagittarius B2(N)”
Thesis supervisor: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten & Dr. Arnaud Belloche
Expertise: Observing experience at APEX Telescope, GILDAS (GREG/CLASS/WEEDS), python, MADCUBA, LaTeX
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.36, Phone +49 228 525 464
Email: labusch@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Laura Ann Busch
Maude Charmetant
Maude Charmetant
Weiwei Chen
Weiwei Chen did his master studies in Astrophysics at Guangzhou university, China. During his master period, he worked on the test of the pulsar emission beam model. In his master thesis, he developed a Bayesian inference program implemented using MCMC to fit the polarization position angle of pulsar with RVM and successfully obtained the inclination angles and impact angles from 123 pulsars. A test of the emission beam of pulsar have been carried out using this results.
In September 2016, he joined the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy Group for his PhD studies working on the beamformer of the MeerKAT and FRBs searching.
Country of origin: China
Starting at the IMPRS : 09/2016
Thesis advisor/supervisor: Dr. Ramesh Karuppusamy/Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Address: MPIfR, Room 0.03
Expertise: C, Python, Bayesian inference
E-mail: wchen [at] mpifr-bonn [dot] mpg [dot] de
Weiwei Chen
Marilyn Cruces
Marilyn Cruces did her BSc. in astronomy at University de Concepción (Chile). Her work there, under the supervision of Dr. Ronald Mennickent involved the period Analysis of Double Period variables (DPVs) from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) based on historical data records from DASH-database. She moved afterwards to Santiago (Chile) to do her MSc. in Astrophysics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, were her work was supervised by Dr. Andreas Reisenegger and co-supervised by Dr. Thomas Tauris. Her MSc. thesis consisted in the study of the magnetic field evolution in neutron star (NS)-cores. She explored a scenario to explain the low magnetic fields in a population of NSs called millisecond pulsars. In such scenario the magnetic field is reduced through ambipolar diffusion.
In July 2016 Marilyn joined IMPRS and started her doctoral studies in the Fundamental Physics in Radioastronomy group. Her research work focusses in the search and follow-up of Pulsar and Radio-transient sources using 100m Effelsberg radio-telescope. The aim is to search the northern sky and to find the most intriguing pulsars, as well explore new techniques for pulsar search.
Country of origin: Chile
Starting date at IMPRS: 07/2016
Title of thesis: “The High Time Resolution Universe Northern Survey reprocessing”
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Michael Kramer and Dr. David Champion
Expertise: programming (python/ipython, bash, C/C++, matlab, fortran), numerical simulations, data analysis, software: presto, sigproc, tempo, dspsr.
Address: MPIfR, office E0.10, +49 228 525 187
Email: mscruces@mpifr-bonn.de
Marilyn Cruces
Jakob den Brok
In September 2019, Jakob started his PhD project at the Argelander Institut of Astronomie (AIfA) in Bonn. He joins the newly formed group of Prof. F. Bigiel and will study the star-formation and the interstellar medium across nearby disc galaxy population using radio and sub-millimeter observations. In particular, studying CO isotopologue ratios in other galaxies can potentially decipher the star formation history.
Before moving to Bonn, he completed his Bachelor and Master in Physics in Switzerland at the ETH Zürich. He worked as part of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS), a complete all-sky survey of the local AGN population, where he is responsible for part of the data reduction. Jakob’s Master Thesis revolved around the study of NIR high ionization lines as tracers of AGN properties such as luminosity and black hole mass. As part of his Master thesis, Jakob had the opportunity to participate in observation runs with the Palomar and the Keck telescopes.
Country of Origin: Germany, Netherland, Switzerland
Started at IMPRS: 09/2019
Thesis Advisor: Prof. F. Bigiel
Expertise: Python, C++, bash/tcsh, IRAF, CubEx, SAOIMAGE DS9, TopCat
Address: AIfA, Room 1.014, email:jdenbrok[at]astro.uni-bonn.de
Jakob den Brok
Rohit Dokara
Rohit Dokara did a dual degree course in physics (bachelors plus masters) at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
From July 2017 to August 2018, as a part of his master’s thesis, he worked on the confirmation of identification of Supernova Remnant (SNR) candidates, which were discovered by the THOR survey. With the help of a few members of the THOR survey and his master’s thesis advisor Dr. Nirupam Roy, he confirmed the status of two candidate SNRs using spectral index data from the TGSS and the NVSS datasets (Dokara et al. 2018, ApJ, 866, 61).
Before astronomy, he worked in several other fields – image processing, space flight dynamics, population dynamics, and graphene.
He joined the IMPRS in June 2019 for his doctoral studies. He will work on the regions of star-birth, with the GLOSTAR survey, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Karl Menten (millimeter and sub-millimeter astronomy research group).
Rohit Dokara
Stefano Ebagezio
Stefano Ebagezio did his BSc at University of Torino. His work, under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Mignone, involved a numerical study of the Bell Instability in the Interstellar medium. That study was performed by using the PLUTO code, written by Mignone et al. Afterwards, he also did his MSc at the same University, where he was supervised by Prof. Luisa Ostorero. His MSc thesis consisted in the study of two possible ejection mechanisms for the Hypervelocity stars (HVSs). These stars are ejected from the Galactic Center (GC) to the outer regions of the Galaxy at high velocity, sometimes exceeding the escape velocity of the Galaxy. He performed numerical simulations with a 3- and 4-body integrator, written by himself, of two different ejection mechanisms, in order to obtain ejection velocity distributions for the HVSs that can be compared to real observations.
In June 2019 Stefano started his doctoral study at University of Cologne, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Seifried in the research group of Prof. Dr. Stephanie Walch. His work currently focuses on producing synthetic observations of simulated molecular clouds. These simulations come from the SILCC and SILCC – Zoom projects. Such synthetic observations aim to identify reliable tracers of molecular hydrogen in molecular clouds, which is the main responsible for star formation, but is very hardly detectable.
Country of origin: Italy
Starting date at IMPRS: 06/2019
Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Daniel Seifried
Expertise: programming (C++, Mathematica), numerical simulations, data analysis.
Address: UzK, 1. Physikalisches Institut, Gebäude 312, Otto-Fischer-Straße 14, 50674 Köln
Email: ebagezio@ph1.uni-koeln.de
Stefano Ebagezio
Cosima Eibensteiner
Cosima did her Bachelor & Master Thesis in Astronomy in Vienna at the department for Astrophysics at the University of Vienna. She worked in Manuel Guedel’s group with ALMA observations and focused on the disk and outflow interactions of a young star.
Other skills:
In addition to Astronomy, she studied Journalism & Communication Science, worked in a PR agency and as an operator in the digital planetarium of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. She also had the opportunity to work with the ESO Head of Outreach during the IAU GA 2018 in Vienna and gained some experience writing popular scientific articles on science.orf.at.
Back to the future:
Now, Cosima is doing her PhD in the group of Frank Bigiel at the University of Bonn. Her project will focus on dealing with radio observations of a nearby galaxy. With the help of molecular spectroscopy, she will be able to find the conditions for the interaction of the interstellar mass and the star formation in the central regions.
Country of origin: Austria
Starting at the IMPRS : 09/2019
Thesis advisor/supervisor: Prof. F. Bigiel
Expertise: CASA, data analysis, ds9, LaTeX, Python
Address: AIfA, Room 1.014
E-mail: eibensteiner [at] astro.uni-bonn.de
Cosima Eibensteiner
Madhuri Gaikwad
Madhuri Gaikwad pursued her Master’s degree in Astrophysics at University of Pune, India where for her thesis she used a new technique to determine the magnetic field of X-ray Binary systems under the guidance of Prof. Dipankar Bhattacharya at Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA). She worked as junior research fellow for a year, at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune where she worked with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) with Prof. Ishwar Chandra. Her project included mapping and imaging, with two frequencies, a 8sq degree field of the galactic sky which is rich in stars and in association, developing a tool to catalog them. Following which, she also worked with Prof. Joydeep Bagchi at IUCAA on SAGAN (Search & Analysis for Galactic Active Nuclei) where she studied the giant radio galaxies and their host properties at multi-wavelength.
She is currently working in the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy group at MPIfR led by Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer. She is part of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) and the Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP) collaboration whose main goal is to detect gravitational waves using pulsars. She is currently studying a system of pulsar whose improved uncertainties on mass, timing etc, will help derive limits to test alternate theories of gravity. She is also involved in studying the position measurement of pulsars using LEAP.
Country of origin: India.
Starting at the IMPRS: 08/2016.
Title of thesis: “Precision Timing of Pulsars with EPTA and LEAP”.
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer, Dr. David Champion, Dr. Kuo Liu.
Expertise: Python, Fortran, AIPS, PSRchive, TEMPO2, observing experience at Effelsberg radio telescope.
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.03, madhuri@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Madhuri Gaikwad
Valerio Ganci
Valerio Ganci has obtained his Bachelor and Master degree in Astronomy at the University of Padova, Italy.
During his master thesis work he collaborated with Dr. Paola Marziani and Dr. M. D’Onofrio studying Active Galactic Nuclei. His work gave new hints on the jetted/non-jetted, radio-quiet/radio-loud dualism of low redshift AGNs.
Valerio started his PhD in June 2019 joining Dr. Lucas Labadie group at the University of Cologne.
He is working on NIR K-band GRAVITY interferometric observations of young stellar objects to reveal the geometry and dynamics of their internal structure.
Country of origin: Italy
Starting at the IMPRS: 06/2019
Title of the thesis: Characterization of young circumstellar disks by spectro-interferometry.
Address: Zülpicher Str. 77, 50937 Köln
email: ganci[at]ph1.uni-koeln[dot]de
Valerio Ganci
Tasha Gautam
She completed her under-graduation in 2015 with a major in Physics from University of Delhi, India. She went on to pursue her masters in physics from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali. During her master’s thesis (supervised by Dr. Satyajit Jena), she studied the internal structure of neutron star which included fitting different models of equation of states (including quark cores) to study their implications on the mass and the radius of a neutron star.
She started her Ph.D. in September 2018 in “Fundamental Physics in Radioastronomy” group. Her research work focuses on the searching and timing of pulsars in globular clusters mainly using the data from Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT, India) and MeerKAT (South Africa). The motivation to do search for pulsars in globular clusters comes from the dense population of stellar systems in globular clusters which provide with the possibilities of studying and discovering exotic binary systems to test the relativistic theories of gravity.
Country of Origin: India
Starting date at IMPRS: 09/2018
Title of thesis: “Searching and Timing of Pulsars in globular clusters”
Thesis Adviser: Dr. Michael Kramer and Dr. Paulo Freire
Expertise: programming (python/bash/C++), presto, sigproc, tempo
Address: MPIfR, office E0.04, +49 228 525 181
Email: tgautam@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Tasha Gautam
Nathan Grin
Nathan Grin
Lorenz
Lorenz Haase
Kevin Harrington
Kevin Corneilus Harrington earned two B.Sc. degrees, in Astronomy and Psychology-neuroscience, as a member of the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, U.S.A. He conducted research with the Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico and Green Bank Telescope in West, Virginia, for his Honors thesis titled “Observations Of The Most Luminous, High-Redshift Star-bursting Galaxies Discovered Using Planck”. He also worked on 2 National Science Foundation funded summer research projects. In the Summer 2014 at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico: “Multiple Methanol Transitions Detected in W51-E2 from the Arecibo Galactic Chemistry Survey (AGCS)” and for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Summer 2015 internship: “GBT Search for HI Clouds Tracing the Nuclear Wind of the Milky Way”.
In July 2016, Kevin joined Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi’s millimeter/sub-millimeter astronomy group with the Argelander Institute for Astronomy, University of Bonn. His PhD thesis work consists of characterizing the global molecular interstellar medium properties of 25 rare, gravitationally lensed galaxies identified by the Planck satellite telescope. This project is a part of the A1 sub-project of the SFB956: “Understanding Galaxy Assembly; Conditions and Impact of Star Formation”.
Thesis supervisor/Advisors: F. Bertoldi / Benjamin Magnelli and Axel Weiss
Country of origin: United States
Starting at the IMPRS: 07/2016Expertise: Observing with 50-m Large Millimeter Telescope, 100-m Green Bank Telescope, IDL, Python
Address: Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany,
Room: 1.026, Phone: +49 (0) 228 73 3521, email:
kharring[at]astro[dot]uni-bonn[dot]de
Kevin Harrington
Ben Hastings
Ben Hastings began his studies in astrophysics with a Bachelor’s degree from University College London,
and later went on to complete a Master’s at the University of Bonn. Supervised by Norbert Langer,
his master thesis was entitled “Internal Circulation Currents in Massive Single and Binary Stars”,
which focused on comparing how internal mixing processes differ in single and binary stars.
Still under the guidance of Norbert Langer for his PhD, Ben will investigate how the effects
of binary evolution, such as mass-transfer episodes and stellar mergers, shape open star clusters.
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Norbert Langer
Address: AIfA, Room 3.017, e-mail: bhastings@astro.uni-bonn.de
Ben Hastings
Christoph Heiter
Christopher Heiter studied physics majoring astroparticle physics at RWTH Aachen university. In his masters thesis he focussed on cosmic ray physics and worked on a Monte Carlo propagation software to simulate their interactions. During his studies he further worked on calibration, alignment and imaging of a muon tomograph. Using his knowledge in instrumentation and software experience he will design and commission a new multiband heterodyn receiver system for the APEX telescope during his PhD. In addition he will investigate the cosmic ray ionization rate as example of application for the receiver.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 01/2018
Title of thesis: „Design and Commissioning of a Multiband Heterodyn Receiver System for the APEX Telescope“
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten, Dr. Rolf Güsten
Expertise: Instrumentation experience at APEX, C++, python
Address: MPIfR, Room: EK.12, Phone: 0049228/525345, mail: cheiter@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Christoph Heiter
Sven Carl Heydenreich
Before working in Astrophysics, Sven Heydenreich studied mathematics in Münster, where he investigated the behaviour of Wall’s finiteness criterion Fn for groups under quasiisometries for his master’s thesis. He then acquired a M.Sc. in astrophysics at the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School. In his master’s thesis, supervised by Peter Schneider, he investigated the effects of varying depth on the analysis of cosmic shear surveys.
Under the supervision of Peter Schneider, he works in the field of weak gravitational lensing for his PhD. Specifically, he investigates the information content and usability of various three-point statistics of polar fields.
Sven Carl Heydenreich
Gudjón Henning Hilmarsson
Guðjón Henning Hilmarsson got his Master’s degree in astrophysics at the University of Iceland, along with half a year of exchange studies spent at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His thesis subject was on the enigmatic Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a relatively new field of study in radio astronomy on millisecond radio transients of extragalactic origin. Henning started his PhD at the MPIfR in July 2016, where he will be looking for FRBs with the new phased array feed (PAF) which will be mounted on the Effelsberg 100 m radio telescope in late 2016.
Country of origin: Iceland
Starting at the IMPRS: 07/2016
Title of thesis: Fast Radio Bursts with PAF
Thesis advisor: Dr. Laura Spitler, Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.10
e-mail: henning (at) mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Henning Hilmarsson
Elaheh Hosseini
Elaheh Hosseini did her undergraduate studies in physics at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, and her master studies in Theoretical and Astrophysics at Shiraz University in Shiraz, Iran, with a focus on Gravity and Cosmology. Her master project was on studying “Dynamics of Spacetime as an Emergent Phenomenon” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. M.H. Dehghani and Dr. A. Sheykhi. Elaheh joined Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckart’s group at the University of Cologne in April 2016 to study the Galaxy Center and Extragalactic Nuclei (AGN/starburst) in Mid-Infrared wavelengths.
Country of origin: Iran
Starting at the IMPRS: 04/2016
Title of the thesis: “Physics of Galactic Center”
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckart
Expertise: Fortran,GR Tensor on maple,Latex, Winedit, Scientific work place
Address: 1st Instit. of Physics, Uni Cologne, Room 210, +49 221 470 6157
Research Gate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/S_Elaheh_Hosseini
Elaheh Hosseini
Huanchen Hu
Huanchen Hu did her BSc. in astronomy at Beijing Normal University in China. She then moved to Europe and joined AstroMundus, a joint masters programme in astrophysics. During these two years, she successively studied at University of Innsbruck, University of Padova, University of Rome Tor Vergata and University of Göttingen. For her master thesis, she worked with Prof. Dr. Laurant Gizon and Dr. Vincent Böning at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. She established a theoretical basis to model the effects of solar g modes on p modes, where she found the p-mode frequency shifts caused by g modes is extremely small, hence indicating a difficult detection of solar g modes through their coupling with p modes. She also found that the interaction of g and p modes takes place largely near the surface.
In October 2018, Huanchen joined IMPRS and started her doctoral studies in the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy group. She work on pulsar timing using European telescopes, MeerKAT and FAST.
Country of origin: China
Starting date at IMPRS: 10/2018
Title of thesis: “Novel Techniques in High Precision Pulsar Timing”
Thesis Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer and Dr. David Champion
Expertise: Python, LaTeX, Mathematica, Matlab, Fortran
Address: MPIfR, office E0.04, +49 228 525 181
Email: huhu@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Huanchen Hu
Arshia Maria Jacob
Arshia Maria Jacob finished her bachelor studies in Physics (hons) from St.Stephen’s College, New Delhi. During the course of her bachelors she was a research intern at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) where she worked on computing orbital trajectories by extending the idea of the classical two-body problem for PSLV-C23 using the fourth order Runge -Kutta iterative scheme and Chebyshev polynomials. She joined the University of Bonn in 2015 to pursue her Master’s degree in Astrophysics. She did her master thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy as a member of the Milimeter and Submilimeter Astronomy group, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Karl Menten and Dr. Helmut Wiesemeyer. Her thesis work aimed at establishing CH as a powerful tracer for molecular hydrogen in the diffuse regions of the interstellar medium. During the course of her thesis she developed a hyperfine fitting algorithm which utilises the Wiener filter deconvolution technique. In November, 2017 she started her PhD as an IMPRS student and continues her multi-wavelength studies of CH in the diffuse regions of the MilkyWay.
Country of origin : India
Starting at IMPRS : 01/ 2018
Title of thesis : Studying the physics and chemistry of the diffuse ISM using CH”
Thesis Advisor : Prof. Dr. Karl Menten and Dr. Helmut Wiesemeyer
Expertise : GILDAS (CLASS/ WEEDS), CASA, Python, C/ C++, LaTex
Address : MPIfR, Room 2.36, Phone : 0228 525464
Email : ajacob@mpifr-bbonn.mpg.de
Arshia Maria Jacob
Joscha Jahns
Joscha Jahns did his Bachelor in Physics and Master in Astrophysics at the University of Bonn. In his Master thesis he investigated a test for systematic uncertainties in future weak lensing surveys (the generalized shear ratio test) under supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter Schneider.
Now he works with Dr. Laura Spitler on analyzing data of the first repeating fast radio burst, and on developing the tools to use fast radio bursts for cosmology.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 03/2019
Title of thesis: “Fast radio bursts as a tools to study ionized plasma across the Universe”
Thesis advisor: Dr. Laura Spitler, Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.10
Phone: +49 228-525-187
Email: jjahns@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Joscha Jahns
Manali Jeste
Manali Jeste obtained her bachelor’s degree in Physics from Fergusson
College, Pune in 2015 and joined the University of Bonn for her master’s
degree in astrophysics. She did her master thesis at Max Planck
Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) titled “HCN emission in CSEs of
carbon rich AGB stars” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Karl Menten
and Dr. Yan Gong. The thesis focused on using multiple HCN lines to
constrain the physical and chemical properties of circumstellar
envelopes (CSEs) of carbon stars, especially the innermost region. She
started her PhD in the same Milimeter and Submilimeter astronomy group
at the MPIfR as an IMPRS member in August 2019. Her PhD project is a
part of ALMA Large Program (LP) ATOMIUM (ALMA Tracing the Origins of
Molecules forming dUst in oxygen-rich M-type stars) aiming to trace the
origins of molecules forming dust in oxygen-rich Miras.
Country of origin: India
Starting at the IMPRS: 08/2019
Title of thesis: Circumstellar region of oxygen-rich stars
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten
Expertise: GILDAS, CASA, LaTex, basic Python and C
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.40, Phone: 0228 525105
Email: mjeste@mpifr.de
Manali Jeste
Ferdinand Jünemann
Ferdinand Jünemann obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Bielefeld University. He wrote his Master thesis “Large sky-area scanning strategies for single dish radio surveys” in the Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology Working Group of Prof. Dominik Schwarz. His primary supervisor was Dr. Aritra Basu. He compared different strategies based on long azimuthal scans with respect to homogeneity and imaging quality. The motivation for this research is an sky survey using the SKA-MPG telescope.
He is now working together with Dr. Hans-Rainer Klöckner on the survey with the SKA-MPG telescope to analyze polarized Galactic foregrounds of the cosmic microwave background. He contributes to the optimization of imaging and calibration during observations as well as backend analysis.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at IMPRS: 06/2020
Title of Thesis:Precise constraint of the cosmic microwave background radiation with a new S-Band southern sky survey
Thesis Supervisors: Prof. Michael Kramer, Prof. Frank Bertoldi & Dr. Hans-Rainer Klöckner
Expertise: Python, C++, ds9, Latex
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.10
Phone: +49 (0)228-525-187
Email: fjuenemann@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Ferdinand Jünemann
Christoph Karoumpis
Christoph Karoumpis
Dongjin Kim
Dongjin Kim obtained his B.Sc. in Physics at Kyung Hee University, Korea. His thesis topic was designing a space-ground VLBI system based on the cube satellite.
Then He earned M.Sc. in Astronomy at Yonsei University, Korea.
In his master’s thesis, he performed VLBI astrometry and single-dish observations for the H2O and SiO masers with a multi-band receiver to investigate the development process of the strong stellar winds from AGB stars.
Also, he worked on identifying chemical properties of the dusty envelope surrounding AGB stars with the SMA and ALMA data at ASIAA, Taiwan.
Currently, Dongjin is working in the VLBI group of the MPIfR under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Krichbaum.
His Ph.D. project is high frequency and high resolution VLBI studies of AGN.
He will focus on detecting and imaging absorption lines caused by molecules in the dusty torus, which may exist in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole.
Country of origin: Republic of Korea
Starting at the IMPRS: 06/2018
Title of the thesis: “high frequency and high resolution VLBI studies of AGN”
Thesis advisor: Dr. Thomas Krichbaum
Expertise : VLBI astrometry, MASER, Language & Software (Julia, Python, AIPS, Difmap, ParselTongue and GILDAS) and Instrumentation.
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.05
e-mail: dongjin@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Dongjin Kim
Tímea Kóvacs
Tímea Kovács did her Bachelor in Physics and Master in Astronomy at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. During her studies, she mainly used multi wavelength data to determine the different physical properties of galaxies (e. g. star formation rate – SFR, stellar mass) by fitting their spectral energy distributions. She investigated star formation in the host galaxies of gamma ray bursts, and the relationship between SFR and the luminosity of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. She observed quasar candidates with an optical telescope in the frameworks of the NEON Observing School.
In the end of August 2019, she joined the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy Group for her PhD studies. She is studying the redshift evolution of galactic magnetic fields, using lensing systems with VLA measurements.
Country of origin: Hungary
Starting at the IMPRS : 08/2019
Thesis advisor/supervisor: Dr. Ann Mao/Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Expertise: Python, HIPE, IRAF
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.03
E-mail: tkovacs@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Tímea Kóvacs
Joana Anna Kramer
Joana Anna Kramer started her undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Bonn in autumn 2013. Besides getting insights on excellent research in Physics she already got the possibility to work on an astrophysical project for her Bachelor thesis at the VLBI group led by Prof. Anton Zensus (MPIfR).
Under the supervision of Prof. Eduardo Ros Joana studied „Very Long Baseline Array Imaging of a TANAMI Active Galactic Nuclei“.
After finishing the lectures of her postgraduate studies in Astrophysics Joana continued working in the VLBI group. In 2019 she studied the impact magnetic field jet morphologies have on the polarization in extragalactic AGN jets on parsec scales within numerical simulations (Master’s thesis: Extragalactic Jets – Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations & Ray-Tracing)
In June 2020 Joana started her PhD in the VLBI group under supervision of Dr. Nicholas MacDonald and Prof. Eduardo Ros. She uses her aforementioned knowledge and skills to gain a full understanding of the synchrotron SED bump of AGN from radio to X-ray.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at IMPRS: 06/2020
Title of thesis: „Magnetohydrodynamic Processes and Polarized Emission in AGN Jets“
Thesis advisors: Dr. Nicholas MacDonald, Prof. Eduardo Ros
Expertise: VLBI data reduction and imaging (AIPS, Difmap), PLUTO, RADMC-3D, python, LaTeX,
Address: MPIfR, Room E.205, e-mail: jkramer@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Joana Anna Kramer
Yuxin Lin
Yuxin Lin did her undergraduate work in Astronomy Department at Nanjing University. Her bachelor thesis was on extragalactic OH megamasers and first-light OHM galaxy candidate catalog for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). She obtained her Master degree in ISM group led by Prof. Di Li at National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences. During her master period, she had an internship at ASIAA in summer of 2015 and did SMA mosaic data reduction on the Galactic mini-starburst region G10.6-0.4. For her master thesis, she developed a method of systematically combining ground and space-based multi-band FIR/submm observations and based on iterative SED fittings, she analysed cloud structure of seven OB-cluster forming regions in the galaxy.
She joined submm group of MPIfR as a PhD student in Sep. 2016 and will continue doing research on massive star formation.
Country of origin: China
Starting at the IMPRS : 09/2016
Thesis advisor/supervisor: Prof. Friedrich Wyrowski and Prof. Karl Menten
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.36
Expertise: observing experience with SMA, Python, IDL, Miriad
E-mail: ylin@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Yuxin Lin
Laila Linke
Laila Linke obtained her Bachelors and Masters degrees in physics at Heidelberg University focusing on cosmology and extragalactic astronomy with an exchange semester at the National University of Singapore. In her bachelor thesis, she worked on an optimal matched filter for the detection of galaxy clusters in weak lensing and photometric data. Her master thesis was concerned with an analytical derivation of the probability distribution of the cosmic density field and the halo mass function from the kinetic field theory description of cosmic structure formation.
In her PhD she is investigating the interplay between baryonic and dark matter by studying the correlation between galaxies and dark matter halos with weak lensing.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at IMPRS: 05/2018
Title of Thesis “Weak Lensing Studies of the Galaxy-Galaxy-Mass correlation in the universe”
Thesis Advisor: P. Schneider
Address: Argelander Institut für Astronomie
Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany
Room: 2.011
Phone: +49 (0) 228 73 3673
email: llinke at astro.uni-bonn dot de
Laila Linke
Eftychia Madika
Eftychia Madika
Parichay Mazumdar
Parichay Mazumdar did his undergraduate work at St. Stephen’s College, India. During his
Bachelors studies, he spent the summers of 2013 and 2014 at the National
Center For Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune, India. There he
worked with Prof. Dr. Nissim Kanekar on Damped Lyman-Alpha Galaxies
(DLAs). They used the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to observe three recently
discovered DLAs in 21cm and used it to determine their masses. He did his
master studies at the Bonn Cologne Graduate School for Physics and
Astronomy (BCGS). He did his masters thesis at MPIfR in Prof. Dr. Karl
Menten’s group. It was titled “Sub-millimeter observations of the
shocked molecular gas associated with the Supernova Remnant (SNR) W28”.
They used the APEX-Telescope to carry out a multi-molecular study of the
SNR W28F in order to better understand the physical and chemical
conditions existing in the post-shock gas in the supernova remnant.
He has started as a PhD student at Max Planck Institut für
Radioastronomie on 1st August 2017. He will work on large scale
surveys of our Milky Way to characterize the physical and chemical
conditions in molecular clouds as well as their kinematics.
Country of origin: India
Starting at the IMPRS: 08/2017
Title of the thesis: “Physical and chemical conditions in giant
molecular clouds”
Thesis advisors: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten, Dr. Friedrich Wyrowski
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.41, Phone- (0228/525) 392
Parichay Mazumdar
Konstantinos Migkas
Konstantinos Migkas did his undergaduate studies in Physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. In his BSc thesis (under the supervision of Prof. Manolis Plionis), he used Supernovae of Type Ia, to tightly constrain the cosmological parameters, as well as to search for possible Hubble expansion anisotropies. After that, he obtained his M.Sc. in Astrophysics degree, in the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, University of Bonn. In his Master’s thesis, together with his supervisor Prof. Thomas Reiprich, they introduced a new method to test the validity of the Cosmological Principle, using the galaxy cluster X-ray luminosity-temperature scaling relation.
Konstantinos started his PhD as a student in the University of Bonn and member of IMPRS, on November 2017. His PhD research in the group of Prof. Thomas Reiprich, currently focuses in the development of a cosmology pipeline which will be used in the all-sky galaxy cluster sample, eeHIFLUGCS, as well as in the eROSITA all-sky catalogue of galaxy clusters.
Country of origin: Greece
Starting at the IMPRS: 11/2017
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Thomas H. Reiprich
Expertise: Statistical data analysis, Fortran, Python, Gnuplot, LaTeX
Address: AIfA, Room 2.027a, e-mail: kmigkas@astro.uni-bonn.de
Konstantinos Migkas
Ana Mikler
Ana Mikler did her undergraduate studies in Physics, at Union College, USA, where she worked with Dr. Andrea Kunder (CTIO) and Prof. Francis Wilkin (Union College). For her bachelors thesis she determined the magnitude limits of the instability strip of the globular cluster IC4499. She then joined the Erasmus Mundus master course in astronomy and astrophysics (AstroMundus) in 2012 and completed her master thesis at Padova University (Italy) under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Alberto Franceschini. In her master thesis she studied the clustering properties of the AKARI Deep Field South (ADFS) region using HerMES observations. On October 2014 Ana joined Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi millimeter/submillimeter Astronomy group at the University of Bonn. For her PhD, she will work under the supervision of Dr. Kaustuv Basu studying the dynamical states of galaxy clusters through Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and X-ray observations in order to constrain cosmological models.
Country of origin: Colombia
Starting at the IMPRS: 10/2014
Title of the thesis: “Multi-frequency analysis of thermal and non-thermal phenomena in galaxy clusters”
Thesis supervisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi
Thesis advisor: Dr. Kaustuv Basu
Expertise: Observing experience at Cerro Tololo 0.9m and 1.0 m telescopes, and with the Arecibo Telescope, Python, Supermongo, LaTex
Address: AIfA, Room 1.026, Phone +49 228 733521, email: amikler_at_astro.uni-bonn.de [more]
Ana Mikler
Andres
Andres Navarro Alsina obtained his bachelor in Physics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He did his scientific initiation in applications of gamma radiation, working in the characterization of a device that can produce images using Compton backscattering. He developed Geant4 Monte Carlo simulations and Root-Cern analysis code looking for better configurations to improve image signal and quality.
Then, He moved to the Universidade Estadual de Campinas where he did his Master in Physics focused on weak gravitational lensing. He worked on the validation and testing of the Y3 shear catalog of the Dark Energy Survey. In his work, Andres used the stars correlation function as a diagnostic of systematic errors. He did null tests to study the variability of these functions with observation conditions, and additionally, he used these statistics to model PSF additive errors and propagate them in final LCDM estimates.
In July 2020 he joined Prof. Peter Schneider’s group, working with Tim Schrabback and Malte Tewes in the use of Machine Learning techniques for high precision shear point estimates and its application in the Euclid program.
Andres Navarro Alsina
Hans Nguyen
Hans Nguyen did his BSc studies in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, Canada where he used the ThrUMMS survey and associated Spitzer and Herschel data, to do a multiwavelength study of the RCW 106 molecular cloud.
He completed his MSc at the University of Bonn developing a source extraction code with fellow master student Chandrashekar Murugeshan and Dr. Andreas Brunthaler and used it to find Formaldehyde sources in VLA data as part of the GLOSTAR survey.
He is continuing this work within his PhD thesis as an IMPRS student improving the code and applying it to new data sets to find tracers of, and better understand early high-mass star formation.
Country of origin: Canada
Starting at the IMPRS: 02/2016
Title of the thesis: “A study of Formaldehyde and Methanol in the Galactic plane as part of the GLOSTAR survey”
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten, Dr. Andreas Brunthaler
Expertise: Observing experience with GMRT radio telescope.
Programming with Python, Fortran, bash/tcsh, Gildas, CASA
Address: MPIfR, Room E2.39, Phone +49 228 525468, email: hnguyen (at) mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Hans Nguyen
Prajwal Padmanabh
Prajwal Padmanabh pursued a Masters in Physics and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics as part of a dual degree course in BITS-Pilani Goa, India. He worked at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in Pune,India for his Masters thesis. Currently he is working in the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy group at MPIfR headed by Dr. Kramer. His work mainly involves Pulsar search using the upcoming MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.
Country of Origin : India
Starting at IMPRS : 05/2017
Title of thesis : Searching for Radio Pulsars with MeerKAT
Thesis advisors: Ewan Barr, Ramesh Karuppusamy, Michael Kramer
Address: MPIfR, Room 0.06
E-mail: prajwalvp@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Prajwal Padmanabh
Georgios Paraschos
Georgios-Filippos Paraschos studied for both his Bachelor Degree in Physics and Master Degree in Astrophysics, Astronomy and Mechanics at the University of Athens, along with a semester of exchange studies abroad, at the University of Bonn. For his Bachelor Thesis he mainly studied the excitation of the CO molecule by fitting Spectral Line Energy Distributions (SLED) using the well known and widely used fitting code called RADEX, in 1D. For his Master Thesis he expanded this work by using a greater sample of galaxies. The study was performed in a spatially resolved manner, in 2D, by creating physical parameter maps of the various physical quantities for each galaxy, using again RADEX.
As of October of 2019, Georgios-Filippos joined the VLBI group at the MPIfR, while being supervised by Dr. Thomas Krichbaum. His Ph.D. project revolves around the study of AGN, using high frequency radio observations.
Country of origin: Greece
Starting at the IMPRS: 10/2019
Title of the thesis: “High frequency observations of AGN”
Thesis advisor: Dr. Thomas Krichbaum
Expertise: Python, CASA, SAOIMAGE DS9, GILDAS, bash, LaTeX
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.05
e-mail: gfparaschos@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Georgios Paraschos
Felix
Felix Pötzl studied Physics at the University of Bonn, finishing his B.Sc. with his thesis about “Submillimeter Observations of lensed Quasar Host Galaxies” under supervision of Prof. Bertoldi and Dr. Albrecht at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (AIfA). There he reduced and analysed APEX data at 870 micron and investigated the relation between bolometric and FIR luminosity in a sample of 10 lensed Quasars at high redshift.
After his B.Sc. he continued with his master studies in Astrophysics in Bonn. In his master thesis, in the group of Prof. Menten at the Max-Planck-Insitut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) and under supervision of Dr. Weiß, he made a statistical analysis of the calculation of molecular gas masses in various galaxy samples. He investigated the influence of various assumptions, and the effect of different physical parameters, on the calculation of molecular gas masses using submillimeter observations of cold dust through cosmic time.
In his Ph.D. project, starting in November 2017 in the VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) group led by Prof. Zensus at the MPIfR, under supervision of Prof. Ros and Dr. Lobanov, he focuses on reduction and analysis of space VLBI data. The polarisation information from so obtained high resolution images can be used to infer the magnetic field strength and structure in the core regions of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The observations shall later be supported by (Magneto-)hydrodynamic (MHD) simulations.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 11/2017
Title of thesis: “Magnetic fields in AGN jets”
Thesis advisor: Prof. Eduardo Ros, Dr. Andrei Lobanov
Expertise: Millimeter data reduction and analysis, VLBI data reduction and imaging; software: BoA, AIPS, difmap, LaTeX; programming: Python
Address: MPIfR, Room E2.05, e-mail: fpoetzl@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Felix Pötzl
Fatimah Mohd Raihan
Fatimah Raihan completed her undergraduate studies in Applied Physics at the
National University of Malaysia (UKM). She joined the University of Bonn in October 2013 for
her MSc in Astrophysics. She worked in the cosmology group in AIfA as a “studentische Hilfskraft”
and did her MSc thesis on “Testing the accuracy of 3D-HST photometric redshifts for weak lensing studies”,
working closely with Dr. Tim Schrabback under the supervision of Prof. Peter Schneider.
Fatimah Raihan is now currently enrolled in University of Bonn for her PhD studies and continuing the
work on photometric redshifts calibration. She is the head tutor for the Astrophysic lab course
S261 Optical Astronomy and also an active member of the AIfA Astroclub.
Fatimah Raihan also in charge and manages the use of the AIfA 50-cm Cassegrain telescope.
Country of origin: Malaysia
Starting at the IMPRS: 03/2017
Title of the thesis: “Recalibration of photometric redshifts for weak lensing studies”
Thesis advisor: Dr. Tim Schrabback
Address: Room 2.025, AIfA
Expertise: Python, Bash, Latex
email: fraihan(at)astro.uni-bonn.de
Fatimah Raihan
Luca Ricci
Luca Ricci did his Bachelor studies in Physics and his Master studies in Astrophysics at the University of Turin, Italy.
His bachelor thesis was focused on constraining the 3D velocity of two wide-angle tailed radio galaxies, within their respective clusters, by means of observational radio data and 2D simulations. The supervisor was Dr Luisa Ostorero and the co-supervisor was Prof Andrea Mignone.
In September 2018, he attended the 5th LOFAR Data Processing School at The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), Dwingeloo.
After that, he started his master thesis, focused on the analysis of a particular FR I radio galaxy (3C 449) by means of LOFAR/VLA data and 3D simulations. The supervisor was Dr Luisa Ostorero and the co-supervisors were Prof Raffaella Morganti and Prof Silvano Massaglia.
The scientific goal was to constrain the propagation of the radio-emitting plasma within the external medium and to study the effects of their interaction on the radio galaxy’s morphology.
Luca defended his Master thesis in April 2020.
In September 2020 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy as PhD student in the VLBI group, led by Prof. Zensus, under supervision of Dr Bia Boccardi. His project is focusing on understanding the jet formation in radio galaxies on sub-pc/pc scales and their evolution within the external medium.
These studies are carried out by means of both observational data and simulations.
Luca Ricci
Christoph Schürmann
Christoph Schürmann studied physics at the University of Bonn. His bachelor thesis covered the relativistic effects of the stars around Sgr A*. He obtained a master’s degree in astrophysics within the BCGS with a thesis on the formation and evolution of millisecond pulsars.
In his PhD project Christoph studies the evolution of massive binary stars using and developing a rapid population synthesis code in Norbert Langer’s group. His primary focus are Be stars and stars with a NS/BH companion.
Address: AIfA, Room 3.018, e-mail: cschuermann@astro.uni-bonn.de
Christoph Schürmann
Shalini Sengupta
Shalini Sengupta completed her Bachelors from St. Xavier’s college, Kolkata (India) and Master of Physics degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She finished her Masters in 2019.
For her Masters’ thesis she worked on “Models to explain the observed Baryon Asymmetry in the Universe”. She used Charge conjugation and Parity (CP) violation, certain Fermionic decay modes and the effect of Cosmological expansion of the universe in driving reactions outside of thermal equilibrium and came up with a credible model for the observed asymmetry.
She worked at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune, India in the summer of 2018. She worked with GMRT data of a Millisecond Pulsar. She studied the pulse profile evolution with frequency of the pulsar to attempt to explain pulsar emission physics and possible geometry of the emission cone. She also did Timing of the pulsar to get improved parameters of it. Timing led to improving significantly the estimated dispersion measure (DM) of the pulsar.
She has joined the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy group of Michael Kramer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy on the 2nd of September, 2019. She works with Dr. David Champion on “Pulsar Searching with the 100m Effelsberg Radio Telescope”. Her project deals with searching for pulsars in the low galactic latitudes, as a part of the High Time Resolution Universe – North (HTRU-N) project using the Effelsberg telescope.
Country of Origin: India
Date of joining IMPRS Bonn: 2nd September, 2019.
Title of thesis: Searching for Pulsars with the 100m Effelsberg Radio Telescope.
Supervisors: Dr. David Champion and Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer.
Expertise: Python, Fortran90, Matlab, PRESTO (pulsar searching software), TEMPO2 (pulsar timing software), SIGPROC,
Address: MPIfR, 53121 Bonn, Office E0.03.
Email : ssengupta@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Shalini Sengupta
Diana Scognamiglio
Diana Scognamiglio is a Ph.D student at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy and her research area are Observational Cosmology and Galaxy Evolution.
Diana earned her BSc at University of Naples “Federico II” (Italy) dealing with the presence of the intracluster light in the Virgo Cluster as a probe to understand the role that accretion events play in the evolution of galaxies in galaxy clusters in which it is detected.
During her Bsc she had been involved in a scientific collaboration with the Sternberg Astronomical Institute of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russian Federation) that evolved in her Msc thesis. She worked on two main methods of the cosmic strings observational search: the analysis of anisotropy of the CMB radiation and the analysis of strong gravitational lensing effects of remote sources by a cosmic string. After finishing her master studies, she spent one year at the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples carrying on the analysis of ultra compact massive galaxies (UCMG) candidates selected in the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS).
For her PhD, she joined Prof. Dr. Schneider’s research group in close collaboration with Dr. Tim Schrabback where she is now working on the scientific preparation of the ESA’s space probe Euclid, in particular the development of techniques for weak lensing galaxy shape measurements that require careful correction for instrumental distortions such as the image point-spread function (PSF), exploiting the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) archive as training sample for weak lensing shape measurements.
Thesis supervisor: Prof. Dr. Peter Schneider
Thesis advisor: Dr. Tim Schrabback
Country of origin: Italy
Starting at the IMPRS: 03/2019
Expertise: Observing experience at 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope and 2.5 m Nordic Optical Telescope, Python, IRAF, LaTeX, SAOIMAGE DS9, TopCat
Address: Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany,
Room: 2.011, email:dianasco@astro.uni-bonn.de
Diana Scognamiglio
Koushik Sen
Koushik Sen is a Ph.D. student in the Stellar Astrophysics group at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy, working with Prof. Dr. Norbert Langer on the evolution of massive single and binary stars, using simulations and observations to constrain various mixing physics that are applicable to massive stars.
Koushik completed his Bachelors and Masters at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India as an Integrated course from 2013-2018. For his masters’ thesis, he worked on “Supernova Remnant Evolution in a Cloudy Interstellar Medium” where he modeled the Taylor-Sedov Phase of the evolution of supernova remnants. During his integrated Bachelors and Masters studies, he also completed two summer research projects. In 2016, he worked on “Radiation Driven Winds in Massive Stars” at the University Observatory Munich (USM), Germany. In 2017, he worked on “Subphotospheric fluctuations in magnetized radiative envelopes: contribution from unstable magnetosonic waves” at the University of Alberta, Canada. At the end of his masters, in 2018, he did another short project on “Laser transmission through fiber at low wavelength (UV) range” at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany.
Country of Origin: India
Starting at IMPRS: 05/2019
Title of Thesis: Evolution of massive single and binary stars
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Norbert Langer
Expertise: MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics), Python, Fortran
Address: Argelander Institute for Astronomy, Auf dem Hugel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany.
Room 3.012, email: ksen@astro.uni-bonn.de
Koushik Sen
Richa Sharma
Richa Sharma completed her undergraduate studies in Physics at Miranda House, University of Delhi, India. She obtained her Master’s degree in Astrophysics from University of Bonn. She did her Master thesis work under the supervision of Dr. Maria Massi in mm-submm group at MPIfR. The title of her thesis was ‘Probing radio variability and gamma-ray emission in microquasars’ and in particular she worked on the radio and TeV data of HMXB LSI +61 303. She recently joined MPIfR as an IMPRS PhD researcher and she will continue her work with Dr. Maria Massi, understanding the accretion-ejection coupling in X-ray binaries.
Country of origin: India
Starting at the IMPRS: 09/2017
Thesis advisor: Dr. Maria Massi
Expertise: C++, Python, LaTeX, bash, Gnuplot
Address: MPIfR, Room 2.39, e-mail: rsharma@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Richa Sharma
Basilio Solís Castillo
Basilio Solís-Castillo did his Bachelor in Physics at the Catholic University of the North in Antofagasta, Chile. In his thesis he studied the dust properties of starburst galaxy NGC253 using sub millimeter data from IRAS, SEST and HHT. He continued his studies with a master in astrophysics at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Chile, where he used an N-body cosmological simulation and a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation to analyze the effects that an AGN can generate in the star formation of neighboring galaxies.
In October 2015 he joined mm/sub mm group at AIfA working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bertoldi and Dr. Marcus Albrecht. His research focuses on the dust-to-gas mass ratio in nearby galaxies and its implications on dust evolution models. He is using far-infrared and sub millimeter observations for performing a comprehensive analysis of the functional dependences of the dust-to-gas mass ratio (DGR) on the underlying ISM conditions, including metallicity.
Country of origin: Chile
Starting at the IMPRS: 04/2017
Title of the thesis: “The dust-to-gas mass ratio in nearby galaxies and its implications on dust evolution models”.
Thesis advisors: Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi and Dr. Marcus Albrecht.
Address: AIfA, Room 1.025, Phone: +49-(0)228-73-3534, email: bsolis@astro.uni-bonn.de
Expertise: Python, GILDAS, IDL, Fortran95 and CASA.
Basilio Solís Castillo
Benedetta Spina
Benedetta is an Italian PhD student, currently working in Prof. Dr. Cristiano Porciani research group at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie. She gained her Bachelor and Master degrees, both in Physics, at the University of Padua (Italy), under the supervision of Dr. Michele Liguori first and Prof. Sabino Matarrese later. Benedetta graduated in 2019, after spending one year in Marseille attending the Erasmus program, where she also started her Master thesis with Dr. Carlo Schimd.
She is mostly interested in cosmology and astrophysics, in particular on the study of the reionization epoch through the 21 cm emission line, which is the current topic of her researcher studies. She is part of the SFB 956 collaboration and a deputy of the SFB student council.
Starting at the IMPRS: 02/2020
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Cristiano Porciani
Expertise: Python, LaTex, TopCat
Address: AIfA, Room 1.007, e-mail: bspina@astro.uni-bonn.de
Benedetta Spina
Tim Sprenger
Tim Sprenger
Nikolaus Sulzenauer
Nikolaus Sulzenauer studied Astronomy at the University of Vienna, Austria (Department of Astrophysics; IfA) where he also obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. In close collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), supervised by Prof. Bodo Ziegler and Dr. Helmut Dannerbauer, he reduced and analysed IRAM 30m-telescope single-dish spectra to verify the nature of novel, all-sky selected, NIR/MIR sources with similar colours as the archetypical strongly lensed submillimetre galaxy (SMG) SMMJ2135-0102. The aim was to characterise the cold gas star-forming conditions in two potentially ultra-bright SMGs via rotational carbon monoxide (CO) and fine-structure neutral carbon ([CI]) transitions at the peak of cosmic star-formation history.
In September 2020 Nikolaus joined IMPRS to start his PhD work in the submm/mm group of Prof. Karl Menten at the MPIfR. Under co-supervision of Dr. Axel Weiß, he investigates the phenomenon of dusty star-forming galaxies in galaxy protocluster cores identified by the South Pole Telescope (SPT) in the high-redshift Universe. By observing bright line emission of [CI], [CII], and CO with contemporary facilities like ALMA, APEX, ATCA, and IRAM NOEMA, scaling laws and the effect of environment on the molecular gas reservoirs of SMGs can be tested to constrain theories of massive galaxy evolution.
Country of Origin: Austria
Starting date at IMPRS: 09/2020
Title of thesis: “Investigating the molecular gas content in high-redshift star forming galaxies”
Thesis Adviser: Prof. Dr. Karl Menten and Dr. Axel Weiß
Address: MPIfR, office 2.30
E-mail: nsulzenauer [at] mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Nikolaus Sulzenauer
Sandra Unruh
Sandra Unruh did her undergraduate work at the University of Bonn. She did her Master thesis in Peter Schneider’s group about strong lensing, i.e. ambiguities in mass profile determinations “Source Position Transformation” including the well-known Mass Sheet Degeneracy as a special case. Sandra is continuing her work at AIfA with Peter Schneider as a part of the Euclid program. She hopes to get a grip on the magnification bias in shear ratio tests of weak lensing.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 05/2015
Title of the thesis: “Generalized shear ratio tests”
Thesis advisor: Peter Schneider
Expertise: C, Mathematica, GnuPlot, LaTeX (basics in Python, bash scripting)
Address: AIfA, Room 2.010
Phone: 0228 73-6588
email: sandra@astro.uni-bonn.de
Sandra Unruh
Jonah
Jonah Wagenveld obtained his Bachelor degree in Astrophysics from Leiden University. In his Bachelor thesis he worked on ALMA observations of a protoplanetary disk under the supervision of Prof. Michiel Hogerheijde.
During his Master’s, also at Leiden University, he focused mostly on the topic of cosmology. In his first Master project he focused on finding quasars at high redshifts using optical and radio data under the supervision of Prof. Huub Röttgering. This research resulted in spectroscopic follow-up and the discovery of a quasar at redshift 5.6 at the Isaac Newton Telescope. In his second Master project he worked on inferring weak lensing power spectra in the Kilo Degree Survey using Bayesian hierarchical modeling, under the supervision of Prof. Koen Kuijken.
For his PhD he joined the fundamental physics in astronomy group at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and is currently working on a project focused on testing large scale cosmology with the MeerKAT radio telescope.
Country of origin: Netherlands
Starting at the IMPRS: 11/2019
Thesis advisor/supervisor: Dr. Hans-Rainer Klöckner / Prof. Dr. Michael Kramer
Address: MPIfR, Room E0.03
Expertise: Observing experience at the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope, Python, LaTeX, CASA, Topcat, DS9, IRAF
E-mail: wagenveld@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
Jonah Wagenveld
Tsan-Ming
Tsan-Ming Wang obtained his Bachelor degree in Physics at National Sun-Yat Sen University and his Master degree in Astronomy at National Central University of Taiwan. He did his master thesis with Prof. Chorng-Yuan Hwang, they studied how the gas motions influence the Star Formation Rate (SFR) on nearby galaxies by using the ALMA and Spitzer data.
In additionally, Tsan-Ming participated the summer school of UCAT in 2016. Working with Prof. Yi-Jehng Kuan they searched the chemical compositions within the atmosphere of Callisto by using the ALMA archive data.
In July 2019 Tsan-Ming joined Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi’s group at the University of Bonn. He is currently using the stacking analysis method to investigate the relations between the gas mass, stellar mass, SFR through different cosmic time in COSMOS field. Their goal is to discover the general picture of the evolution history of galaxies.
Country of origin: Taiwan
Starting at the IMPRS: 07/2019
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi
Expertise: Python, CASA, LaTeX, bash
Address: AIfA, Room 1.001, e-mail: twang@astro.uni-bonn.de
Tsan-Ming Wang
Chaoli Zhang
Chaoli Zhang did his undergraduate studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He obtained his master degree at Leiden University in Netherlands. For his master thesis, he worked with Prof. Dr. Huub Rottgering on the large-scale structure around a high-redshift radio galaxy (Z>2), using data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and Herschel SPIRE. Prior to his master thesis, he worked with Prof. Dr. Koenraad Kuijken for a minor project on weak lensing. After finishing his master studies, he took a gap year to work at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Peking University as well as in the Shanghai Observatory. During the work in China, he became interested in the field of star clusters. He used the HST/VISTA observations to investigate on the mass function for one of the largest Globular Star Cluster in our galaxy, 49 Tucanae. In October 2017, he joined Prof. Dr. Thomas Reiprich’s Dark Energy Group at Argelander Institute of Astronomy (AIfA) for a Ph.D. thesis, and he will continue the cosmology study, but this time, through the galaxy clusters in X-rays.
Country of origin: China
Starting at the IMPRS: 10/2017
Title of thesis: Galaxy clusters in X-rays
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Thomas Reiprich and Prof. Dr. Peter Schneider
Expertise: Python, LaTeX/Lyx, Mathematica, CIAO, HEASOFT, Topcat, CASA, PyMC
Address: AIfA, Room 2.027A, e-mail: chaoli@astro.uni-bonn.de
Chaoli Zhang
Rongchuan Zhao
Rongchuan Zhao
Hannah Zohren
Hannah Zohren obtained her Bachelor degree in Physics and her Master degree in Astrophysics at the University of Bonn. She did her master thesis in Prof. Dr. Schneider’s research group in close collaboration with Dr. Tim Schrabback. Here she worked on optical observations of a sample of galaxy clusters selected based on their Sunyaev Zel’dovich signal in the Planck SZ maps. Her aim was to estimate the clusters’ redshift photometrically and spectroscopically as well as obtaining a mass estimate based on the richness of the clusters. She will continue her work as a PhD student at AIfA where she will focus on weak lensing mass measurements of high-redshift clusters. She wishes to thereby help to investigate astrophysical and cosmological questions in a previously unexplored regime.
Country of origin: Germany
Starting at the IMPRS: 03/2018
Title of thesis: “Weak-lensing mass estimates of high-redshift galaxy clusters”
Thesis supervisor: Prof. Dr. Peter Schneider
Thesis advisor: Dr. Tim Schrabback
Expertise: Observing experience at 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope, python, Linux and bash usage, IRAF, Theli
Address: AIfA, Room 2.026, Phone +49 228 73 3678, email: hzohren(at)astro.uni-bonn.de
Hannah Zohren