Outreach & Community
My talk on: "An Extragalactic Murder Mystery: Do Black Holes Kill Galaxies?" at the Munich Pint of Science festival in May 2023.
Outreach
A huge advantage we have as astronomers is that so many people - of all ages and from all walks of life - are interested in the universe and the work we do in studying it. I always enjoy the opportunity to share my research, for example at the Pint of Science festival in Munich.
I'm excited to be part of the team running an exhibition at the Great North Museum: Hancock on the history of astronomy and telescopes in the North East of England. I'm responsible for the audio-visual media: we're planning to project interviews with astronomers onto a life-size JWST mirror - so stay tuned for that!
Community
The reality is that life in science can be tough, so it's important to foster a supportive and encouraging environment. During my time at ESO, I chaired the Student Representative committee where we served the student community to try and make our PhD lives a little better. I successfully advocated for additional support during the cost-of-living crisis, organised mental health awareness events, helped organise the Summer Student Programme and communicated the students' opinions to the Office for Science.
I also performed several other community roles, such as being part of the Selection Committee for the Summer Research Programme, a Scientific Assistant for the Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) and organiser for the Informal Discussion and AGN Coffee talk series.
Student reps working hard and enjoying the sun!
School Internship
One of my more enjoyable weeks in the last year was supervising a secondary school pupil on a school internship. We spent the week firing foam darts out my office window and calculating their trajectories. I then used this physical intuition to build up to her programming a simple model of the Solar System in Python and exploring the orbits of planets and comets. This was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for both of us. You can find my simple Python notebooks for the planetary orbits on Github.