Sera Markoff

I just found out that I have been elected to serve as one of the members of the steering committee for “Commission X1: Supermassive Black Holes, Feedback and Galaxy Evolution” within the International Astronomical Union (IAU): http://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann15024/#x1. Commission X1 is tasked with organising official IAU activities around this interdisciplinary topic, falling under two larger IAU […]

Congratulations to my postdoc Chiara for producing the newest group member, Noah! Seen below, he is giving a fist pump ready to embark on a promising career in astrophysics, we’ll have him generating code in no time!

This past Friday I gave a public lecture as part of a new (and very cool) initiative in Amsterdam called “We Are Public“. A group of ‘editors’ curates cultural events around town for members, so far it has been primarily things like art, dance and music, but they are experimenting with including some scientific events

No, I’m not moving to Texas (though the thought has crossed my mind!). I’m enjoying the last rays of sun I’ll see for awhile, as I head back to Amsterdam tomorrow. But in the meantime it’s been officially announced that I’m joining the editorial team of Astroparticle Physics Journal: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/astroparticle-physics/news/new-editors-for-astroparticle-physics/ This is the first time

My time in Austin is (sigh) almost over, but I wanted to start posting some things about the trip, I guess we’ll all be catching up for awhile (see Riley’s post in the Group blog). It’s been such a privilege to be at UT Austin for over 2 months as a Tinsley Visiting Professor. I

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

This is pretty cool: the Science News article linked from the front page of the NYTimes is about the G2 object’s imminent encounter with Sgr A* (or at least its accretion flow). I have a minuscule quote but anyway it’s a great article about a very interesting event, that we hope will shed some new

I seem to be on a roll here! I use the very professional word “gunk” to describe the material between the Galactic center and us in this little blurb in Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=milky-way-black-hole-jet. I was not involved in this paper but I find it super interesting, and in fact one of the PhD students in