Biographical+Sketches

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Members: //**Please place your sketch in alphabetical order by last name**//

[|Sverre Aarseth]
is a retired postdoc from the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. His extensive website of [|direct N-body codes] has gained an embarrassing popularity. Large N simulations can be speeded up by codes for special-purpose GRAPE or GPU hardware. Technical challenges consist of implementing diverse regularization algorithms for binaries and compact subsystems. Among favourite research topics are trying to understand dynamical evolution of open clusters and post-Newtonian simulations of IMBHs in small globular clusters.

[|Peter Anders]
is a postdoc at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. His main interests are in evolutionary synthesis models (the GALEV models, integrated spectrophotometric predictions), applying them to observations (and deriving physical parameters from them), dynamical N-body studies, and studying the biases and uncertainties inherent to these topics.

Giuseppe Bertin
is a professor at the Universita' degli Studi di Milano. His main scientific interest is in the dynamics of galaxies. In recent years, he has also studied several aspects of gravitational lensing and of the dynamics of self-gravitating accretion disks. He is currently investigating some dynamical problems related to the structure of globular clusters, in particular the origin of their observed shapes.

[|Sourav Chatterjee]
Sourav is a graduate student at the Northwestern University working under Fred Rasio. He is interested in dynamical evolution of star clusters and dynamics of planets and planetary systems.

David Chernoff
is David Chernoff. He's at Cornell. He studies a lot of things.

[|Melvyn Davies]
Right-ho. Melvyn is a professor at Lund University in Sweden. He studies bags of things, including the nobbling of planetary systems in clusters, the stability of solar systems, and a wee bit of interacting binaries. Though he has spent hundreds of fortnights in the US, he regularly delivers verbal googlies to Americans unfamiliar with his native lingo.

[|Guido De Marchi]
Is an astronomer in the Space Science Department of ESA in the Netherlands. He is interested in stellar populations, and in particular star clusters young and old, which he observes with ground and space telescopes. He is intrigued (and puzzled) by the effects that dynamical evolution has on the stellar mass function. When he has nothing better to do, he also watches stars grow in the Magellanic clouds, where he studies the evolution of the mass accretion rate on pre-main sequence objects as a function of their age.

Jonathan M. B. Downing
Jonathan is a PhD student at the University of Heidelberg working with Rainer Spurzem. He is interested in the compact binary population of globular clusters, primarily as sources for gravitational radiation. He is also interested in the problem of multiple generations in globular clusters although he is not currently actively working on the topic. He uses both a PN-enhanced direct N-body code and Monte Carlo simulations in his research. Jonathan used to moonlight as a supervillan but has now doffed his hat and cape for more insidious forms of madness.

Pepi Fabbiano
is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her main scientific interest is galaxy evolution, and the constraints that can be posed to this with X-ray observations: binary populations formation and evolution; hot ISM enrichment and evolution; nucleus-galaxy feedback. She is also the head of the Data System Division of the Chandra X-ray Center and a partner in the Virtual Observatory.

Francesco Ferraro
is full professor at the Astronomy Department of the Bologna University. He is also chair of the teaching activity of the two courses supported by the Department (the Degree in Astronomy and the Specialistic Degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology). His research activity is focussed on the observations of stellar populations in globular clusters. In particular he is interested in studying the impact of dynamics and environment on passive stellar evolution and in the processes generating exotic objects (Blue Stragglers, Millisecond Pulsars, IMBH, etc.).

Tassos Fragos
is a graduate student at Northwestern University, under the supervision of Vicky Kalogera. His research interests focus on the formation and evolution of Galactic and extra-galactic X-ray binaries.

[|John Fregeau]
[|is] [|currently] a [|postdoc] [|at] [|KITP], [|working] on the [|evolution] of [|globular clusters] [|via] [|theory] and [|numerical simulations].

Michiko Fujii
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo working with Jun Makino. She is interested in dynamical evolution of star clusters within their host galaxy especially in the galactic center.

[|Aaron Geller]
is a graduate student at the [|University of Wisconsin - Madison], working with Bob Mathieu. Currently, his research interests focus on observations of four key open clusters of a wide range in age (NGC 188, M67, NGC 6819 and M35), concentrating specifically on characterizing the binary populations and detecting and analyzing the anomalous stellar populations (e.g. blue stragglers). Soon he will begin work on N-body simulations to model these same open clusters in order to understand the evolution of the binary population and the origins of these observed anomalous stars.

[|Mark Gieles]
is a Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Chile where part of his time is spent on long (boring) nights on the [|Very Large Telescope] (yes, this is the name of the most expensive and high-tech optical observatory in the world) at Cerro Paranal. In day time, he works on observations and evolution of stellar clusters in different environments through the use of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, N-body simulations with [|Starlab] and high resolution spectroscopy with the multi-object spectrograph [|FLAMES].

[|Evert Glebbeek]
is a postdoc at McMaster university, formerly a PhD student at Utrecht University. At [|CIBC] they can't pronounce his last name and just call him "[|Doctor]". He works on stellar (and binary) evolution in star clusters, in particular the evolution of stellar collision products. He also has an interest in mixing processes in stars and stellar winds. He is actively involved in the MUSE project.

Paul Goudfrooij
(another Dutch guy with surname starting with a deep G, and pronounced close to "Howd-froy" for the non-Dutch) is a (mostly observational) astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. His main scientific interests are kind of two-fold: (1) globular clusters and their use in constraining scenarios of galaxy formation and evolution as well as stellar population synthesis models, and (2) the evolution of the ISM in early-type galaxies. Lately, much of his work focused on the properties of intermediate-age globular clusters.

[|Brad Hansen]
is associate professor at UCLA. He hasn't worked that much on globular clusters recently, but still manages to get invited to these workshops because he has, in his possession, some entertainingly incriminating photographs of Fred Rasio.

**[|Douglas Heggie]**
is at the School of Mathematics at Edinburgh University, Scotland, but he speaks astrophysics. He likes globular clusters, simulations, few-body interactions and Bach.

[|Natalie Hinkel]
researches at Arizona State University as a [|graduate student] with [|Frank Timmes]. She is modeling the chemical evolution of nearby stellar clusters (i.e. globular clusters) via a [|3D] hydrodynamic code in hopes of determining their formation/evolution by a direct comparison to observation (once it's written). At this point she is very interested in the causation of GC multiple branches.

Loren Hoffman
is a postdoc at Northwestern. She is interested in galaxy formation, in particular what we can learn about it by comparing observations of stellar, globular cluster, and planetary nebula kinematics and dynamics with numerical simulations.

is a staff astrophysicist in the [|Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing] at [|Swinburne University]

[|Natasha Ivanova]
is in transition between being a CITA postdoctoral fellow during this KITP meeting and an assitant professor at the University of Alberta right after this KITP meeting. Her main research interests are in evolution of interacting stars: X-ray binaries formation and evolution, mass exchange, stellar collisions and common envelope.

Stephen Justham
is a research fellow at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. So far, he has mostly worked on the evolution of field binaries (especially X-ray binaries), supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.

Paul Kiel
has handed in his PhD thesis and is awaiting feedback. He studies at Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing at Swinburne University with Jarrod Hurley (see above) and has examined population synthesis of LMXBs and pulsars (typically binary pulsars). Paul will also be moving to Northwestern University later this year, hence his participation in clusters09.

[|Sungsoo S. Kim]
is a professor at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He works on the dynamical evolution of globular cluster systems and plans to work on the formation of globular cluster systems in the early stage of the universe using high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. He also works on the Galactic center, galactic warps, and molecular filaments in the Orion region.

[|Andreas Kuepper]
is a PhD student of Pavel and Holger at the AIfA Bonn. He's also collaborating with Douglas if he's around. Together they are working on N-body simulations of star clusters and tidal tails. They find overdensities where there should be no overdensities and miss overdensities where there should be overdensities. It's a mess!

**Arunav Kundu**
is a research assistant professor, i.e. a doubly [|qualified] professor, at Michigan State University. He has apparently stumbled upon the brilliant career path of being an observer who points out the flaws in all sorts of accepted observational wisdom. He ought to consult Keith Ashman about alternate careers that involve moving to Vegas and [|living off overconfident poker playing tourists].

Chuck Lajoie
is a Ph.D. student at McMaster University working with Alison Sills. He is mainly interested in simulating mass transfer in binary systems using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with the hopes of forming blue stragglers. A better understanding of how these objects form might help us identifying their main formation scenario, if any. After a long day of debugging, Charles likes to unwind by taking a long bubble bath and listening to 80's pop music, especially Cindy Loper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun".

Barbara Lanzoni
is researcher at the Astronomy Department of the Bologna University (Italy). Her research activity has been focussed for about 10yrs on elliptical galaxy (collisionless) dynamics, N-body cosmological simulations of dark matter halos and galaxy formation modeling. During the last 3yrs her research interests moved to the "exotic" populations (blue stragglers stars, intermediate-mass black holes, millisecond pulsars) in Galactic globular clusters, both from a theoretical and (mainly) an observational point of view.

Nathan Leigh
is a Ph.D. student at McMaster University working with Alison Sills. His research interests include stellar mergers and star cluster evolution. He is currently working on an analytic model for blue straggler formation in globular clusters. Nathan is also working on burping the alphabet backwards, although this turns out to be more challenging than initially thought.

Tom [|Maccarone]
is a lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton. His research interests as related to this program are primarily X-ray and radio observations of globular clusters both in our own and other galaxies. He is also interested in accretion wherever else it happens. He enjoys hearing new pronunciations of his last name every time he moves to a new country. He was sad to leave England to come to Southern California in the springtime, but is the kind of guy who makes sacrifices for the sake of science.

[|Bob Mathieu]
is a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. With Douglas Heggie he helped promote a unified system of units in star cluster research---the so-called [|N-body units]. This is why, for example, when asked for sizes of things his answer is usually of order unity. He is easily recognized by his smile, which persists even though he lives in a state which has a relatively long, cold winter.

[|Steve McMillan]
is actually a gross misspelling of the folkloric Irish name "Stíofán Mc Aoibheann ", meaning "the one who fixes Síomón's bugs". Steve is a professor of physics at [|Drexel University]. His research interests include the dynamics of dense stellar systems, the formation and evolution of young star clusters, the formation and dynamics of intermediate-mass black holes, and multiple stellar populations in clusters. His work focuses on N-body simulations, using the [|Starlab] package and the emerging [|MUSE] environment.

Cole Miller
is a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland currently working on the theory that all astronomical concepts can be conveyed using a basketball. He also has unholy past ties to Steinn Sigurdsson, but on occasion overcomes them to work on theoretical models of neutron star and black hole accretion, as well as gravitational wave sources involving intermediate-mass black holes.

**Eva Noyola**
is a postdoc fellow at the Max-Planck Instititute for Extraterrestrial Phyisics in Garching (Germany). She is interested in every aspect of dynamics of star clusters. Lately she has been working in testing the photometric and kinematical signatures of intermediate-mass black holes in Galactic globular clusters.

**Genevieve Parmentier**
is a //Humboldt// Fellow at Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie, Bonn (Germany), and a Belgian Science Policy Fellow at Institute of Astrophysics and Geophysics, Liege (Belgium). Her research interests are concerned with the dynamical evolution of star cluster systems, how their properties, e.g. cluster age/mass/size distributions can be used as probes to star formation, galaxy evolution and characteristics of cluster environment.

**Mario Pasquato**
is a graduate student at Università di Pisa (Italy). His research interests include intermediate mass black holes in globular clusters (in particular the effects of an IMBH on stellar mass-segregation, as a way to spot IMBHs) and globular cluster scaling laws (e.g. the Fundamental Plane relation) and related statistical properties. He is currently working with Giuseppe Bertin on the latter topic and with Michele Trenti on the former.

[|Philipp Podsiadlowski]
is a professor at the University of Oxford. His main interests are stellar evolution theory and its applications to binary evolution, supernovae and galaxy evolution.

[|Simon Portegies Zwart]
is perhaps most famous for hiding scores of publications from online journal search tools, since they mistakenly believe his last name to be "Zwart" and not the full "Portegies Zwart". To compensate for this, he has taken permanent positions in both astronomy and computational science at the University of Amsterdam and a faculty position at Leiden University, where he publishes "early and often" on a wide range of issues relating to star cluster formation and evolution, and the associated cutting edge numerical algorithms. He is actively involved in Starlab and [|MUSE], among many other projects.

[|Fred Rasio]
is one of the program coordinators and a professor at [|Northwestern University] in Chicago. His research interests cover the dynamics of dense star clusters, massive black hole formation, gravitational wave astrophysics, and extrasolar planetary systems. His previous work on globular clusters has focused on Monte Carlo simulations of Galactic clusters, the hydrodynamics of stellar collisions and mergers, and the formation and evolution of compact objects.

Aaron Romanowsky
is soon to be an Associate Specialist II (no, it's not a Stallone sequel) at UCO/Lick in Santa Cruz. Originally a "theorist" modeling the structure and dynamics of nearby galaxies and star clusters, he turned to observing when the data flow dried up. And was there something about free trips to tropical islands? He ruthlessly exploits globular clusters as probes of dark matter and formational properties of external galaxies, and is interested in using the GC orbits to trace their formational and dissolutional processes backwards. He also plans to go and see one of the Clusters09 organizers about how to do humour.

Steinn Sigurdsson
[|Steinn] is an associate professor at Penn State. His interests include stellar dynamics, compact objects, binaries and stellar exotica. Particular current interests in globular clusters include: blue stragglers; pulsars; black holes and planets.

Ken Shen
is a grad student here at UCSB working with Lars Bildsten. His research focuses on thermonuclear phenomena on/in accreting white dwarfs (supersoft sources, classical novae, .Ia supernovae [no, that's not a typo], etc.). He is an interloper at this program and should not be listened to.

**[|Alison Sills]**
is one of the program coordinators and an associate professor at McMaster University. Her main interests include blue stragglers and other unusual stellar populations, hydrodynamics of stellar collisions & interactions, and their effects on the cluster environment. She is also interested in the early evolution of globular clusters. Alison is an avid wrestling enthusiast and has yet to miss a WWF-sanctioned event. If you happen to attend a show, she is usually in the front row sporting a painted face and screaming at the top of her lungs. You can't miss her. She also spends time thinking up nasty tasks for [|grad students] who edit wikis when they should be doing more productive things.

[|Rainer Spurzem]
is professor of the faculty of physics and astronomy at the university of Heidelberg (UHD), working at the //Astronomisches Rechen-Institut// in the Centre of Astronomy (ZAH) of UHD. His main research interests are stellar dynamics and modelling techniques of dense stellar clusters, black holes and relativistic dynamics, galaxy evolution, and high-performance parallel computing using general and special purpose hardware. He is teaching Computational Physics and Astrohysics for graduates and undergraduates. He is leading the [|GRACE project], and is actively involved in the [|Astrogrid-D] project.

[|Jay Strader]
is a postdoc at Harvard/CfA. He is an observer focused on photometric and spectroscopic studies of extragalactic globular cluster systems. He is a fan of Rajon Rondo and cephalopods (he once had a [|pet octopus]).

Michele Trenti
is a postdoc at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is interested in the dynamical evolution of globular clusters and the signatures of the presence of Intermediate Mass Black Holes at their center.

Stefan Umbreit
is a postdoc at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He is interested in stellar dynamics, specifically in the dynamical evolution of globular clusters with and without intermediate-mass black holes at their centers.

Ed van den Heuvel
is professor of Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His interests are: formation and evolution of compact objects in binary systems and the study and origins of Gamma-Ray Bursts. Among other things he presently chairs the Time Allocation Committee of ESA's INTEGRAL gamma-ray satellite and is a member of ESA's Space Science Advisory Commitee.

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Anna Lisa Varri
is a graduate student at the Università degli Studi di Milano. She is interested in stellar dynamics, in particular in the interpretation of the observed flattening of globular clusters.

Enrico Vesperini
is one of the program coordinators and a research associate professor at Drexel University. His research interests include the dynamical evolution of globular clusters, the formation and evolution of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters, and the evolution of globular cluster systems.

Simone Zaggia
is research astronomer at the Padova Astronomical Observatory. He has recently worked mainly on dwarf galaxies and on the Milky Way. He his going back to his studies on the dynamics and evolution of globular clusters.

[|Steve Zepf]
is a Professor in astronomy at Michigan State and co-director of the Center for the Study of Cosmic Evolution. His research is primarily in extragalactic astronomy, with a long-standing focus on the formation and evolution of galaxies. Due to his hectic schedule, his many trips between Michigan and Santa Barbara have given him enough frequent flier miles to qualify for the uber-elite, unadvertised "Diamond" status, with which he can skip first class and actually fly in the cockpit!