July 2014

  • CIERA Director, Prof. Vicky Kalogera, was elected as the astrophysics trustee, among only nine trustees, of the NSF-funded Aspen Center for Physics on July 9, 2014. The ACP is a center for physicists that offers long-term workshops, conferences, and research opportunities for those invited to attend. ACP Trustees provide overall scientific, financial, and administrative guidance; typically, only one or at most two astrophysics positions open up every decade. Congratulations, Vicky!

  • The Illinois Space Grant Consortium awarded six CIERA students with scholarships for the 2014-2015 school year. Graduate students Katie Breivik, who studies under Prof. Shane Larson, and Jason Hwang, who studies under Prof. Fred Rasio, were each awarded $10k by the ISGC. Undergraduates Ben Sandeen, who works with Prof. Vicky Kalogera, Matt Hroma, who works with Prof. Giles Novak, and Emily Ellinger, an advisee of Dr. Jason Steffen, were also each awarded $3k scholarships through this program.  Undergraduate student Daniela Deleon, who works under Prof. Mel Ulmer, also received a $2k scholarship. Congrats to the students and faculty! Read Full Story

June 2014

  • CIERA is pleased to host a group of talented student researchers this summer. Among these students, nine have been awarded funding from Weinberg College and NASA’s Illinois Space Grant Consortium. The students are listed below, with their projects: 
    • Leah Perri "Characterizing Astrophysical Parameter Estimation Capabilities of LIGO"
    • Lauren Barmore “Visualizations of Planetary Formation and Dynamics” 
    • Shyam Bharadwaj “Feedback from Star Clusters in Cosmological Simulations of Galaxy Formation” 
    • Emily Ellinger ”Modeling the Effects of Gaseous Disks on Planetary System Orbits “
    • Matthew Hroma “SHARP Instrument Upgrades, or Instrument Improvements to the SHARP Polarimeter”
    • Tyler Karian and Shannon Grogans are both working on “Next-Generation X-ray Optics”
    • David Lee “Understanding the Orbital Properties of Exoplanets”
    • Ben Sandeen “Gravitational Waves and Black Hole/Neutron Star Binary Systems”

  • CIERA Professor Giles Novak has been appointed as the new faculty director of the Tech Instrument Shop. Novak started the new three-year position in June 2014. As the faculty director, Novak directly oversees the shop, which is a full-service machining, fabrication and repair facility. He also chairs the faculty advisory committee, supervise staff and their professional development, lead fundraising efforts to expand the shop’s capabilities and services, and partner with the Office for Research to make strategic decisions to ensure its financial stability. Read Full Story

May 2014

  • Scotty Coughlin, an undergraduate student who has been working in Vicky Kalogera’s LIGO group, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Starting in September 2014, the award will allow Coughlin to pursue LIGO-related at Cardiff University in Wales. There he will work with Professor Patrick Sutto. At Cardiff, Scotty will be pursuing a Masters of Philosophy in Gravitational Waves Physics. He will develop a dedicated low latency, i.e. quick turnaround, supernova detection pipeline, to catch the next Galactic core-collapse supernova and determine the explosion mechanism. Read Full Story.

April 2014

  • Tuesday, April 22, 2014 Computational Research Day: a series of talks, panel discussions, and a poster session, took place. In the poster session five awards were given. Graduate Student Niharika Sravan and Undergraduate Student Scotty Coughlin each won first prize for their posters (in the Graduate Student and Undergraduate Student section, respectively) at Northwestern's Computational Research Day. Read Full Story.

  • High school student Sara Anjum, a mentee of Dr. Laura Trouille (CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow and Astronomer at the Adler Planetarium), won first place in the Space Science category at the Northeastern Science and Engineering Fair held in Cleveland, Ohio. She also received first place in a special awards category by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and an invitation to present her results at the upcoming AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in June. Read Full Story.

  • CIERA Postdoctoral Fellows Nick Cowan and Daryl Haggard have both accepted Assistant Professor position in theDepartment of Physics and Astronomy at Amherst College, in Amherst Massachusetts. They will start there in the Fall of 2014, so will be with us, here in Evanston, until late August, 2014. Daryl & Nick are looking forward to building a new astronomy program at Amherst, and exploring the many opportunities in the Five Colleges Astronomy Department. Congratulations, Nick and Daryl!

March 2014

  • Congratulations to Assistant Professor Yoram Lithwick for securing a prestigious NSF CAREER award! Yoram is a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and a CIERA Faculty Member, as well. His proposal, entitled "Planet Formation in the Age of Kepler" was just accepted by the NSF. Read Northwestern News Story

  • Graduate Student Ben Farr, who works in Professor Vicky Kalogera's group, has been awarded the Robert R. McCormick Fellowship at the University of Chicago. He will start his work there on July 1st, focusing on gravitational-wave astronomy, and in particular, on the detection and characterization of compact binary mergers from their gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signatures.
October 2013
  • Graduate student Ben Farr received the "Blue Apple Award" at this year's Midwest Relativity Meeting for the best student presentation at the meeting. Ben's talk was entitled "A Hierarchical Approach to Rapid Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation", and described his work on quickly and accurately extracting new constraints on compact objects from future gravitational-wave detections.
September 2013