I had the pleasure to contribute to a new outreach initiative by the Leibniz Association (and in association with T-Online): “Zehn Fragen, ein Experte – das Wissenschaftsquiz”, an online knowledge quiz in which you can test your knowledge of astronomy and space in ten questions. It was a lot of fun to come up with these question, which are aimed at being sufficiently challenging, fun, and informative at once. Unfortunately, the quiz is only available in German.

Here’s a link to the quiz, titled “Was ist eigentlich dunkle Materie? Testen Sie Ihr Astro-Wissen!”.

In early 2020, I gave a presentation in the public talk series Babelsberger Sternennächte of the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam (AIP). It was very well attended, but still only people in Potsdam could participate. Now that everything has moved online, I had the pleasure to record that talk, titled “Dark Matter and the Dance of Dwarf Galaxies”, for the new Virtual Babelsberger Sternennächte.

As of May 20, it is available online on YouTube, and I’ve also embedded it below.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that my proposal for a junior research group here was selected for funding by Leibniz-Gemeinschaft via the Leibniz Competition. The project will start next summer, and is located here at at the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP). There has been an official press announcement from the Leibniz Association, and more details can be found in the AIP’s press release.

The five-year project is about phase-space correlations of satellite galaxies, planes of satellites and more. It’s incredible that this topic, which I started to work on 10 years ago and which was met with a lot of skepticism, grew into such a success that I can now give people jobs. I will be hiring two PhD students, have already advertised one postdoc position in dwarf galaxies / near-field cosmology (with an observational emphasis). Application deadline is December 31, 2020, and the position is for up to five years total. Please reach out if you have any questions about this position or the application process.

I am incredibly grateful and want to thank everyone who made this success possible. Without those who gave me opportunities, support, mentoring, or collaborated with me over the years, this success wouldn’t have happened. Thank you!

On Friday, October 9 POSTPONED TO January 8, 2021 at 7:30pm PDT*, I’ll give a public science talk titled: “Dark Matter and the Dance of Dwarf Galaxies”. It is hosted by the Orange County Astronomers, but of course online (via Zoom), and free! Furthermore, I’m really happy to at least virtually return to California and OC (where I spend two+ years as a Hubble Fellow at UC Irvine).

If you’re in a compatible time zone, interested in learning what I’m working on at a general audience level, and don’t have plans for Friday night yet, you can register via this link.

*: Which will be 4:30am for me here in Germany … *yikes*. At least I don’t have to travel.

After a super successful EAS symposium, I am organizing yet another conference session. For a change, this one is not focussed on a specific science topic, but rather is about the way we work in Astronomy and what we might (need to) improve.

Together with Victoria Grinberg (Uni Tübingen) I am organizing a splinter session on “Healthy Careers in Astronomy” on September 23, as part of the German Astronomical Society’s (virtual) annual meeting.  The session aims to start a conversation about stress and mental health in our field, and some of our speakers will also share some resources on how to deal with such problems. We particularly hope that this will contribute to decreasing the stigma around conversations on topics such as mental health, stress management and career anxiety.

The idea for this was born out of the interdisciplinary Mental Health and Time Management workshop I organized in Potsdam in October last year … and a Twitter exchange. Victoria was interested, but too far away to participate in the local workshop. So we briefly discussed whether we might organize something similar for an astronomy audience, which eventually became a successful splinter meeting proposal and resulted in our session … which turned virtual due to the Corona pandemic.

We’re especially grateful to our speakers for agreeing to support this initiative! You can find more details here, and see the schedule below.

The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society is happening this week. This year, I am not only a participant and speaker (two talks, one on Tuesday in S10, the other on Wednesday in S7). No, I am also chair of the SOC organizing one of the two-day symposia: S11 – The Local Group in Context: Galaxies in the Local Volume as a Testbed of Cosmology. It will take place on Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, and consists of a total of six 1.5h sessions, a total of 30 talks and 10 ePosters.

When I had applied for this opportunity with the concept for this Symposium, last year and way before anyone had heard of the Corona virus, the conference was expected to take place in Leiden, The Netherlands. Things came differently, the conference switched to a massive virtual meeting (approaching 1500 participants in total), and also my symposium had to switch to a different format. Despite such challenges, I think we have a highly interesting symposium coming up, and I’m excited about the many excellent speakers who will contribute to our meeting.

Below, you find some more information on our symposium: