UChicago Astronomy Workshops

The Broader Horizons talk series aims to educate members of the department, especially students and postdocs, on what career options lie outside of academia by bringing those with astronomy and physics PhDs to speak about their careers.

Next week as part of this series, we'll be hosting Jeff Bezaire from Jump Trading who will be speaking about his work as a quantitative trader.

Abstract:
As a "quant" working at an electronic trading firm, I develop models and strategies for fully automated, computerized trading of futures and equities in electronic markets around the world. In this talk I'll describe what I do, different roles for quants in finance and trading (and in particular in Chicago), and why physics/astrophysics grads are particularly good at it. The short answer - teasing causal relationships out of large datasets with time-varying, non-Gaussian noise, horrible non-stationary correlated systematics, from telemetry of questionable quality, where understanding what's going on at the hardware level is important... and making it all run fast too.

Jump Trading

The PSD Women in Science, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics invite you to a seminar by Prof. Meg Urry from Yale University on: Women in Science: Why So Few?
on Wednesday January 18th, at 12pm noon at Kent 120.

Talk: Women in Science: Why So Few?
Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The gender imbalance is particularly large in Physics, where fewer than 20% of college physics majors are women. Decades of research suggest this is due in large part to lower expectations and evaluations of women as leaders, thinkers, do-ers. I discuss the experimental data and outline steps that can be taken to mitigate these obstacles. Fuller participation is better for the field and better for everyone.

Speaker: Prof. Meg Urry
Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Chair, Department of Physics
Director, Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Yale University

The Society of Women in Physics (SWIP) at the University of Chicago is partnering with the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) to hold a dinner for undergraduate students interested in physics. Professors and Postdocs will join students for a pizza dinner and roundtable discussion about the joys and stresses of pursing a career in physics.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a faculty member at a minority-serving institution? A teaching-focused university? A state-funded organization? I will describe what led me to become interested in such a position, some of the thrills and challenges, as well as the requirements for landing the job and earning tenure. As a member of the AAS astronomy education board, I will provide tips and information on how to make your astronomy teaching more engaging and effective. Finally, I will briefly discuss the importance of astronomy education research and what led me to become involved in a project targeting student understanding of cosmology.

9:00 - 10:30 am

Welcome and Presentation: Speakers Profs. Kolb (welcome), Chen, and Hu

10:30 - 12:00 am

Meetings

12:00 - 1:00 pm

KICP Lunch Seminar, LASR lounge (lunch will be provided)

1:15 - 1:45 pm

Meeting

1:45 - 2:15 pm

Outreach Talk w/Randy Landsberg, TAAC 67

2:15 - 3:30 pm

Walk Around Campus (with grad students)

3:30 - 4:30 pm

Panel Discussion (with grad students and postdocs), TAAC 67

4:30 - 6:00 pm

Wine and Cheese Reception, Kitchen/Library

6:00 pm

Gather in AAC Lounge

7:30 pm

Maggiano's Little Italy

The talk will include:

• Description of the initial instrument and results from science runs
• Description of the current instrument upgrade
• Prospects for detection of gravitational waves
• Some future directions:
• international network of detectors
• electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave detections
• future developments of the instrument in response to detections

On Thursday 15 March, we will host the next Postdoc symposium in the LASR conference room. It will take place from 1.30 pm to 5 pm. There will be food and snacks in the beginning and pizza at the end.
Speakers:

• Craig Booth, "Feedback and Galaxy Formation: From Small Scales to Large"
• Claudio Ugalde, "The Superheated Target for Astrophysics Research"
• Surhud More, "How accurate is our knowledge of the galaxy bias?"
• Rahul Biswas, "Topics in Supernova Cosmology"
• Peter Adshead, "Chromo-Natural Inflation"
• Will High, "Weak gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters in the South Pole Telescope survey"
• Michael Solontoi, TBA
• Eduardo Rozo, "A Fully Self-Consistent Picture of Galaxy Cluster Abundances and Optical, X-ray, and SZ Scaling Relations"

The workshop will focus on methods for identifying type Ia Supernvae (SNIa) without spectroscopy. The emphasis will be on using these photometric SNIa for Hubble Diagram analyses in PannStarrs, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

Organizers:

• Richard Kessler
• Joshua Frieman

Construction continues on the Giant Magellan Telescope. The next event is the first blasting for the leveling of the top of the mountain to prepare the site for the telescope.

On Friday, March 23, at 01:00 PM, Chilean Time, (11 am Central time), the First Blast (Big Bang event), will take place at Las Campanas Observatory.

The live streaming is provided thanks to the courtesy and close collaboration of the US Embassy in Chile.

Louis E. Abramson, Randall H. Landsberg: "PHENOMenology: Stepping Through the Scientific Method"

Act out the scientific process as both investigator and phenomena in this interactive lab that explores the concepts of observation, inference, correlation, and causation.
Friday, March 30, 2012 @ 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Indiana Convention Center, 207

Randall H. Landsberg, Mark SubbaRao: "Science Visualized: The Art of Science"

Pictures and images allow all types of learners to approach and explore modern science. Experience learning with depictions of cosmological data and remote observatories.
Saturday, March 31, 2012 @ 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Westin Indianapolis, Grand Ballroom 3

Randall H. Landsberg, Kathryn Schaffer: "ART/Science"

From zines to art installations, this collaboration between the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago offers unique STEM learning opportunities.
Sunday, April 1, 2012 @ 8:00-9:00 AM
Indiana Convention Center, 106

The Flash Center for Computational Science is the developer of FLASH, a highly capable, fully modular and extensible radiation-hydrodynamics/MHD community code that scales to well over a hundred thousand processors. FLASH is currently being used to simulate phenomena range of scientific fields, including astrophysics, cosmology, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, and high energy density physics (HEDP). I first describe the challenges of exascale computing, and the Center's strategic plan for taking FLASH to the exascale. I then describe the Center's discovery of an entirely new explosion mechanism for Type Ia (thermonuclear-powered) supernovae, and its program to validate current models of these events using simulations and high-quality observational data from the SDSS Supernova Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. Finally, I describe the Center's collaboration with the High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics Group at the University of Oxford to use FLASH to help design, execute, and analyze HEDP experiments that are transforming our understanding of the generation and amplification of cosmic magnetic fields, and the properties of matter in the interiors of planets.

Argonne, Fermilab and KICP will host a one day Chicagoland and Midwest Dark Matter Workshop with the goal of bringing together the collider, indirect and direct DM communities. The workshop is geared towards persons interested in Dark Matter who live within a 4-5 hr drive of Chicago. The workshop will be held in the Curia II conference room in Wilson Hall at Fermi National Laboratory.

Questions to discuss:
* What are the strengths and weakness of each approach to DM?
* Where do the different approaches complement each other in a way that provides more information than each individually?
* What are the prospects for making progress with each technique over the next decade?
* How can we build a larger community that can argue effectively for DM experiments leading up to the Snowmass 2013 meeting?

Organizing Committee:
Dan Bauer, Karen Byrum, Juan Collar, Dan Green, Salman Habib, Dan Hooper, Alexander Paramonov, Carlos Wagner, Ben Zitzer.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host Non-Gaussianity Hub workshop on April 19-21, 2012. We plan to bring together theorists and data analysts in this 3-day workshop on non-Gaussianity to consolidate the recent progress and discuss future efforts. We expect attendance by about 30 worldwide leaders in the field of non-Gaussianity.

Come to the workshop with your constraint on f_NL not worrying about systematics or uncertainties in the other cosmological parameters and work on the analysis of simulations:
* How would the systematics enter?
* What about inflationary input?
* Model -> observables?

Astronomy Lecture presented by Dr. John Carlstrom

We are in the middle of a revolution in our understanding of the Universe. We can finally begin to answer questions such as "How old is the Universe? How did it start? What is the Universe made of? Cosmologists at the University of Chicago have been searching for answers to these questions in one of the most forbidding places on Earth: the high Antartica plateau. Dr John Carlstrom will speak about new measurements being carried out with the 10-m South Pole Telescope to test the inflation theory of the origin of the Universe and to investigate the nature of Dark Energy. The South Pole Telescope studies the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, the fossil light from the Big Bang, providing a direct view of the Universe as it was 14 billion years ago.

John E. Carlstrom is the Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. Dr. Carlstrom is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship.

One hundred years ago humans first arrived at South Pole and for the past 20 or so years scientists have traveled there to build telescopes to study the early Universe. These experiments measure light left over from the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB). They provide a unique snapshot of the infant Universe at a time when it was only ~400,000 years old, or 0.003% of its current age. These measurements and other evidence tell us that the Universe began with a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, and that it contains only 4 percent "ordinary" matter (e.g., stars and galaxies, you and me, etc.). The rest of the Universe consists of two mysterious dark components: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. We will discuss evidence for the Big Bang, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy; the latest results from the South Pole, and what its like to work at the bottom of the world.

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest instrument (with an extension of 3000 km²) ever built to study ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The observatory, completed in 2008, has already accumulated the world's largest data set of extensive air showers developed by ultra-high energy cosmic rays using a hybrid technique that exploits the advantages of two well-stablished detection procedures. Latest results including measurements of the energy spectrum, anisotropy in the arrival directions, mass composition and hadronic interactions will be presented.

Dear Colleagues,
Please join us as we honor Roger Hildebrand on the occasion of his 90th birthday with a special EFI Colloquium and reception to be held Monday, May 7, 2012. The event will begin at 4:00 pm with coffee/tea/cookies in room 206 of the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 South Ellis Avenue, followed by a series of short presentations in the large lecture hall, KPTC 106, about different aspects of Roger's career. We will wrap up with a reception* following the talks. We hope you and your guest will be able to join us in celebrating Roger on this occasion.

Women in Science 2012: Big Ideas Big Impact, builds on the successful 2010 Women in Science: Building an Identity, during which more than 200 women scientists attended an exciting day of plenary talks, panel discussions and breakout sessions.

Specifically the Women in Science Symposium 2012 will focus on:
* Highlighting innovative, game-changing women in diverse science and engineering fields
* Discussing modern approaches to research practice, work-life balance, entrepreneurship and administration
* Providing meaningful opportunities for discourse and networking

Who should attend? This event will convene women scientists and engineers interested in sharing ideas and learning from leading women in - academia, industry, government, business and the nonprofit sectors - to share ideas and experiences critical for the 21st century.

Friday, May 11, 2012
School of the Art Institute of Chicago; 112 S. Michigan Avenue - 1st Floor Ballroom
5:30PM - 7:30PM Reception & Registration
7:00pm - Key Note Speaker - Alice Huang Senior Faculty Associate in Biology at the California Institute of Technology, and Past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Saturday, May 12, 2012
Northwestern University - Lurie Medical Center; 303 E Superior St., Chicago, IL
8:30am - 9:30am Registration & Continental Breakfast
9:30am - 4:00pm Full-Day Symposium

The 4th Neutrino workshop will take place from Friday May 18th to Saturday May 19th in Chicago, IL. The workshop is being hosted by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) in the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR) building at the University's of Chicago main campus in Hyde Park.

The main topics of the workshop are:
* Neutrino and Cosmic Microwave Background
* Neutrino and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
* Current bounds on N_nu and Sum m_nu from cosmology
* Sterile Neutrinos in the Early Universe
* Sterile Neutrinos in Astrophysics
* Terrestrial "hints" for sterile neutrinos: short-baseline anomalies
* Reactor Neutrino Experiments
* Theoretical understanding of neutrinos from nuclear reactors
* Theoretical Models of neutrino mass

Francis Slakey is the Upjohn Lecturer on Physics and Public Policy at Georgetown University and an Associate Director at the American Physical Society, where his focus is the intersection of science and society. The founder and co-director of the Program on Science in the Public Interest, a Lemelson Associate of the Smithsonian Institution, and a MacArthur Scholar, Dr. Slakey has been featured by NPR, National Geographic, and others, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, and Scientific American. In recognition of his adventures, he carried the Olympic Torch from the steps of the U.S. Capitol as part of the 2002 Olympic Games. In July of 2009 he became the first person to summit the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host The Dark Energy Spectrometer workshop on May 30-31 to discuss DESpec, a conceptual next generation dark energy project to enable massive spectroscopic surveys in the southern hemisphere. It would naturally synergize with the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which will start taking data later this year, and with LSST in the longer term. The goal of this meeting is to review past and present work on DESpec and to make plans for how to proceed. We will briefly review the current state of the instrument design and then identify the next steps in the project, including describing the R&D necessary to proceed with theory, survey strategy, and instrument definition. The goal of the workshop will be to begin to assemble the DESpec team, define the project's mission statement, and plan how to proceed in the coming year.

You are cordially invited to attend the Chicago Council on Science and Technology's 2nd Annual Fundraiser "Science in the Second City"

The Evening's Events Include:
"Discovering Alien Worlds" by Astrophysicist Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Award Ceremony, Silent Auction, Cocktails and Plated Dinner.

Event Emcee:
* Tammie Souza, Meteorologist /Fox News
* Edward "Rocky" Kolb, Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Chicago

with special guest
Jacob Bean, Assistant Professor, Department of Geophysical Sciences and the College, University of Chicago

Proceeds from this event will support "The Chicago Council on Science and Technology's
public programming."

$250 Per Person $5000 Per Table
(Donation includes a community level membership)

RSVP: call 312-567-5829, or email: crhodesc2st.org

Free parking available for attendees adjacent to the Adler Planetarium

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host a Summer School on Dark Matter Detectors from July 11th to July 21st 2012. The aim of the School is to expose a select group of 15 to 20 graduate students to the challenges of designing, building, and operating both current and future dark matter detectors for searches conducted at underground laboratories. The School will provide the students a full-immersion, hands-on experience, with several labs exploring experimental techniques for dark matter detection. Planned experiments that students will be able to perform include: calibration of photon detectors, characterization of ultra-pure Germanium detectors, radiopurity determination through spectroscopic measurements, the art of fighting electronic noise, shielding techniques, measurement of a scintillator's quenching factor, particle detection with a bubble chamber and CCDs, and measurement of electroluminescence in noble gases. Data acquisition and simulation techniques will also be covered.

The School will be held in the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR) at the University of Chicago. A visit to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where the students will become familiar with noble liquid, bubble chamber and cryogenic detectors, is also included.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host the 9th International Conference "Identification of Dark Matter, 2012" in Chicago, USA on July 23-27, 2012. The conference will take place in downtown Chicago at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza.

The main topics of the conference are
* Dark matter candidates
* Dark matter direct searches
* Dark matter indirect searches
* Connections with accelerator searches
* Halo models and structure formation
* Weak lensing
* Neutrino physics
* Cosmology and dark energy

The conference will include both invited and contributed talks as well as a few more specialized sessions.