The most important recent news (besides Salomé’s defense on 1 July!) is that I have been selected for the 2015 Beatrice Tinsley Centennial Visiting Professorship at UT Austin (where a “distinguished mid career or senior professor is invited to visit for up to a semester”), to spend some months in spring 2015 at the Astronomy Department there! I’m super excited, Chiara and I had a great visit there this past March when I gave the colloquium and there were so many interesting research connections that it was a natural fit for our group. So the plan is for Chiara and Riley (and maybe Adam, who starts as a new PhD student in October) to come along for a month or so, while I stay somewhat longer. Along with discussing research with many members of the faculty there, particularly my hosts Craig Wheeler and Pawan Kumar, I will also give some seminars for the faculty/students on specialised topics.
On a personal level it’s also nice to have a connection to Beatrice herself, who was an esteemed cosmologist and the first female to be a tenured professor in Astronomy at Yale (see: bio, and also this blurb). Beatrice didn’t have the opportunities I had, and she fought a valiant struggle to do the thing she loved at a time when most universities has non-spousal hire (read: no women faculty) policies. She finally got the chance to be a full professor at a place that valued her, and then tragically died of cancer a couple years later, at age 40. She was the advisor of my good friend and collaborator David Meier (shameless plug but it’s a great book!) during his UT Austin days, and he had told me so many nice things about her, so for me it’s a special honor on several levels.
Finally my husband found a picture posted on the new AAS (American Astronomical Society) photos website, from a nice special session at the January 2014 AAS meeting, “News from the Galactic Center: A Multiwavelength Update on the Sgr A*/G2 Encounter” organised by Daryl Haggard. Besides the fact that I seem to be a bit squeezed in and don’t know what to do with my hands, it’s a nice photo of some Galactic Center buddies!
