AAVSO 2022 Webinar Guest Astronomers

is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is one of the world’s most highly cited astrophysicists. He was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Voted by students as the “Best Professor” on the UC Berkeley campus a record nine times, in 2006 he was named the Case/Carnegie National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions, and in 2022 he received the AAS Education Prize. He has produced five astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 120 television documentaries.

is a NASA Hubble Fellow at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA. He completed his PhD in Physics at Caltech and was previously a CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He is a founding member of the STARFORGE collaboration, and specializes in the theory of star formation and developing new methods for astrophysical simulations.

is an astrophysicist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, where she searches for, characterizes, and catalogues planets orbiting other stars. She is the lead scientist on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, and has worked on the NASA Kepler, K2, and now TESS missions, to characterize the demographics of exoplanets, and to find and study the nearest planetary systems to Earth – systems that will be perfect for further study with the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes.

is an astrophysicist with over two decades of science communication experience. Her research involves the lifecycles of stars, and she has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Headquarters, and the Goddard Space Flight Center, where she is currently the liaison between the Office of Communication and the Science Directorate. Outside her work at NASA, she has appeared in many television science programs, including How the Universe Works and Space’s Deepest Secrets. Dr. Thaller has done two TEDx talks about astronomy, and has hosted the podcast Orbital Path on public radio.

leads the ASAS-SN project, in collaboration with other astronomers. He is an astronomy professor and University Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State University. His expertise lies in supernovae & gamma ray bursts, galactic structure, and time-domain astrophysics. Dr. Stanek was one of the recipients of the AAS Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize in 2020 for the efforts on ASAS-SN.

studied the accelerating expansion of the universe, with his observations earning him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at Johns Hopkins with a joint appointment with the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is an observational cosmologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Riess is also a past winner of a MacArthur Grant, the Breakthrough Prize in Physics, the Einstein Medal, the Shaw Prize, and the Gruber Prize.

inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics—work recognized by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.

Dr. Burnell has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Academic in Oxford, and the Chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has been President of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics for the UK and Ireland, and in 2014, the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme.

Dr. Burnell has received many honors, including a $3M Breakthrough Prize in 2018.

is an astronomy professor at the University of Washington. Her work explores how the most massive stars in the universe evolve and die. She has observed for upwards of fifty nights on many of the planet’s largest telescopes and flown over the Antarctic stratosphere in an experimental aircraft for her research. Her academic accolades include the 2014 Annie Jump Cannon Award and the 2020 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society. She recently published her first popular science book, The Last Stargazers, which takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour through the world of professional astronomy.

(Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

Starting with her PhD Thesis on Betelgeuse, Dr. Karovska has used both spectroscopic and high-spatial resolution imaging techniques to study astronomical sources ranging from our Sun and young stellar objects, to evolved variable stars and binary systems, to SN187A and other supernovae remnants, to extragalactic sources including active galactic nuclei. Recent observing campaigns have focused especially on physical characteristics of accretion in systems at scales ranging from stellar interacting binaries to supermassive blackhole environments. Her studies of variable stars and stellar systems, including evolved giants and supergiants and symbiotic systems containing hot accreting companions, are greatly assisted by the AAVSO data bank of long-term observations and by monitoring campaigns.

is the incredible scientist who is the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan's novel, "Contact" (which later became a motion picture starring Jodie Foster). Dr. Tarter is chair Emeritus for NASA's SETI Research, and presently, is on the management board for Hat Creek Radio Observatory's Allen Telescope Array. She earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and her career has included heading a variety of radio observation programs around the world and successfully fundraising for research.

Tarter's research, along with her dedication and leadership, have earned her numerous accolades over the years, including Women in Aerospace's Lifetime Achievement Award, Chabot Observatory’s Person of the Year award, and Telluride Tech Festival's 2001 Tesla Award of Technology. She was also awarded the prestigious honor of being included in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2004.