Astronomy and Visualizations

Chair: Eduardo Hardy, ALMA Speakers: Douglas Roberts, Northwestern University Juan Cortés, ALMA

Speaker Details

Doug Roberts is an adjunct Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois and now works with the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) team at Microsoft Research. He leads various radio astronomy efforts to understand the supermassive black hole at the galactic center—called Sagittarius A*. Recently Roberts led many of the important radio observations monitoring the close approach of a large gas cloud to the Sagittarius A*.

Roberts uses scientific visualization, including WWT, to interpret his own research and communicate it to professional and public audiences. As a new member of the WWT team, he is a liaison between Microsoft Research and the planetarium, astronomical research and informal learning communities. He is keen on connecting research and outreach activities and developing the visualization innovations necessary to bring them together.

Rodrigo Cortés is Ph.D. in Astronomy (U. de Chile, 2005), and M.Sc. (Yale University, 2002). After graduation until 2008, he worked as post-doctoral researcher and support astronomer for the Chilean astronomical community in the Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE), for the National Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and Universidad de Chile.

Dr. Cortés is associated scientist for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory of USA (NRAO), and works as Science Operation Astronomer in the Atacama Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), where he works on the development of the project tracking system and life-cycle, as well as ALMA data reduction, technical assessor, and the study of weather statistics and the impact of the Altiplanic winter in ALMA operations. His research interest includes galaxy evolution in cluster of galaxies, galaxy mergers and interaction, stellar and ism kinematics of galaxies, as well as computational astronomy. Dr. Cortés also participates actively in outreach talks to the community and it is the editor of the NRAO newsletter for Chile.

Date:
Speakers:
Douglas Roberts and Juan Cortes
Affiliation:
Northwestern University , ALMA