Sera Markoff

Ok I was too tired last night (or rather, early this morning) to complete my report from Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost, sorry to leave the ~10 people reading this in suspense! It turned out to be quite a harrowing situation. Shep (the PI) referred to it as a more typical “angst-ridden” decision, because the […]

It’s a tense night here at the Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost! All sites have remarkably good weather except SMT (marginal but not terrible) and LMT (worse than marginal but potentially variable). The team decided to do a provisional “GO”, but are reconvening at 1:00am Europe time to see what things look like then. Given

I am really excited, I get to participate in the go/no go decision tonight with EHT Central Command!! We’re going to decide if tomorrow is the big day for Sgr A* (remember, my favorite black hole), when we might observe for something like 10 hours. What is extra cool is that we have some overlapping

So the first EHT run last night has gone really well, though of course there were a few technical issues. I really enjoyed being on the Slack channel and following the communications in realtime from all the stations across the globe. Not to mention the snarky comments (people competing between SPT and LMT for being

I just got back from a month at UT Austin as a visiting Tinsley Scholar, which was great. Two years ago I went for three months as a Tinsley Professor, and got to bring part of my research group with me, but this time was a smaller scale visit. I started two projects that I

The new group has arrived as of this week (woohoo!) and I will be adding some information about that as soon as possible, but in the meantime I thought I would just mention some news, which is that as of last month I have been elected to be a member of the Science Council of

Ok, I realize that my language here is a bit politically incorrect, but sometimes you just can’t say it any other way. Prof. Fiona Harrison kicks ass! She’s professor and the current department chair at the Astronomy/Physics Dept at Caltech, one of the top universities in the world. But more importantly, she designed a friggin’

I was thrilled to find out last week (around the time of the big Gravitational Wave detection!!) that I was awarded a Vici grant from the Dutch National Research Organization (NWO), basically 1.5 million Euros to hire 3 PhD students and 2 postdocs over the coming 5 years! The title of my proposal was ““From

NEW:  Due to rain we are postponing this event until next week, probably Thursday or Friday 20 or 21 August.   Stay tuned by checking the website if you were interested.  I heard it sold out so I’m pretty excited to have a good crowd, but maybe with the date change there will be some