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 micro- to megascales: understanding how black holes shape the local universe”, and focuses on how black holes release energy from stuff they gravitationally capture, and dump it back into their surroundings. There’s a nice description on the press release from our science faculty here. So anyway we had our annual PhD recruiting last week and…

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 cancellations… Thanks to the folk at Non-Fiction, who organise many cultural events around Amsterdam, I will be participating in an exciting late night talk on top of the Oude Kerk (the Old Church), one of the oldest structures in the heart of Amsterdam! Non-Fiction are curating a series of cultural events in August and September…

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 science categories called “Divisions” (if it sounds Kafka-esque it is because it is…): “High Energy Phenomena and Fundamental Physics” and “Galaxies and Cosmology”. Our main task is to build international community awareness and scientific exchange around this theme, including the organisation of major international conferences. I guess I will find out more soon, it doesn’t…

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 and we were one of the guinea pigs. So I gave a lecture about black holes to a group of people who were about half from media/arts background (I know, because I used a voting system, something I use also during teaching!), which is quite a different group than we usually grab for our public…

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 I’ve been an editor of a professional journal, I’m a bit nervous about the time commitment but it’s an important function to make sure the referee process works, and they’ve assured me the load won’t be too bad. And I’m joining a great group of people, so I’m looking forward to learning the ropes in…

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 am one of those people who needs uninterrupted blocks of time to think, whether it’s for writing or coming up with new ideas. Being in a university environment is very stimulating, but because many things in our schedules are out of our control (teaching, staff meetings, organisational meetings etc), our days get filled up with…

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…

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 light on our Galactic Center’s supermassive black hole (and my personal favorite black hole…). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/science/its-snack-time-in-the-cosmos.html?src=dayp&_r=0

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 my group, Sander Walg, is going to try to construct a model of the jet/cloud interaction using the MHD code AMRVAC. We want to see if we can reproduce the features with values for the jet and surrounding parameters that are consistent with our best models and data.