Dr. Laura Brenneman currently serves as the Deputy Associate Director for the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (Cambridge, MA). Her research focuses on understanding how active galactic nuclei and their supermassive black holes co-evolve through the processes of accretion and energetic outflows. She is a pioneer in measuring how fast black holes rotate using spectra from X-ray observatories. She has leadership roles in several current, planned and proposed international X-ray missions.
Dr. Brenneman received her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007. Following a two-year NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD), she was awarded a fellowship at the CfA in 2009. She has been a Smithsonian employee on the scientific staff at the CfA since 2014. Dr. Brenneman enjoys engaging with the public on astronomy topics both formally and informally. She has given presentations at public observatory nights, museum speaker series, elementary schools, online learning forums, and the U.S. Congressional “Space on the Hill” seminar.
Dr. Dan Wilkins is a research scientist in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. His research focuses on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, how matter plunging into them powers some of the most extreme objects we see in the Universe and the important role they played in the formation of the Universe as we know it today. Alongside his research, he is working towards developing some of the next generation of space telescopes that will observe X-rays from the most energetic processes in the Universe.
Dan received his doctorate in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge in 2009. After a short research fellowship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he was awarded NASA’s prestigious Einstein Fellowship, which brought him to Stanford in 2016. Dan has a passion for communicating science to the public and helping people explore the wonders of the night sky. He regularly gives talks to a wide variety of audiences, from universities to astronomical societies, schools and even on-board cruise ships, as well as hosting stargazing evenings and planetarium shows on Transatlantic sailings of Queen Mary 2.
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