Every summer the astronomy graduate students host a series of seminars highlighting the novel and diverse research being conducted by astronomers at UVic and the NRC-HAA. Not only does this allow local astronomers to present the depth and range of their current research, but it gives the audience the opportunity to learn about cutting-edge research being done in Victoria.
Interested in presenting? We invite all astronomers from UVic and NRC-HAA (faculty, post-docs, research personnel, graduate students, co-op students) to present for 30-45 minutes on a current research project. We also welcome external collaborators of UVic and NRC-HAA personnel to present as well. If you are interested in presenting, reach out to anyone on our organizing committee.
Organizing Committee: Max Kurzner (mkurzner@uvic.ca) and Scott Wilkinson (swilkinson@uvic.ca)
Interested in attending? The 2024 astronomy seminar series will be held TBD (with some flexibility for certain speakers). We will be providing the option to attend the seminar virtually over Zoom. See the table below for scheduled seminars.
We respectfully acknowledge that the UVic astronomy seminar series is held on the ancestral territories of the Lekwungen peoples. We strive to honour the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples who were the first astronomers of this land and whose continued stewardship is crucial to its preservation.
2024 Presentations
This summer in lieu of a formal seminar series we instead invite any interested members of the greater Victoria Astronomy Community to a”Research Rendezvous” in collaboration with ARC! The Research Rendezvous will be held on August 22nd from 10AM – 12:30PM in Bob Wright A104 (with lunch to follow in the lobby!) and will feature a series of short talks highlighting all the recent astronomy work being done in Victoria. This is a great opportunity to share your research with the local astronomy community, learn from others, and develop your presentation skills. If you are interested in attending please fill out the signup form!
2023 Presentations
| Date | Speaker | Seminar Title | Location |
| June 7th | Falk Herwig | 3D Hydrodynamic simulations of massive main-sequence stars | CLE A317 |
| June 14th | N/A | No seminar this week. Many astronomy unit members attending CASCA. | N/A |
| June 21st | N/A | No seminar this week | N/A |
| June 28th | N/A | Rescheduled to July 5th | N/A |
| July 5th | Jaclyn Jensen & Federico Sestito | Small-scale stellar haloes: detecting extended substructure in the outskirts of Milky Way dwarf galaxy satellites & The extreme outskirts of Sculptor and Ursa Minor dwarf galaxies | Recorded Seminar |
| July 12th | Jess Speedie | Spiral wakes: Signposts of planets embedded in protoplanetary disks” | Recorded Seminar |
| July 19th | Shoshannah Byrne-Mamahit | Feeding Supermassive Black Holes with Galaxy Interactions | Recorded Seminar |
| July 26th | Simon Smith | Hunting for the Faintest Stellar Systems in the Local Group | Recorded Seminar |
| August 2nd | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| August 9th | Madeline Marshall | Observing the Host Galaxies of High-z Quasars with JWST | Recorded Seminar |
| August 16th | N/A | Rescheduled to August 23rd | CLE A317 |
| August 23rd | Trystyn Berg & Leonardo Ferreira | Constraining the chemistry of the first stars from the most metal-poor quasar absorption line systems & The Optical Morphologies of Galaxies beyond z~3 with JWST | No Recording |
| August 30th | Flash Talk session for summer students and first-year graduate students | Presentations by Aviv Padawer-Blatt, Anya Dovgal and Camyrn Mullin | BWC A104 |
2022 Presentations
| Date | Speaker | Seminar Title | Location |
| 8 – 6 – 2022 | William Thompson | Fireflies, wobbles, sirens, and sunsets | |
| 15 – 6 – 2022 | Sara Ellison | Gas and star formation in the nearby universe with the ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) survey. | |
| 22 – 6 – 2022 | Shoshannah Byrne-Mamahit | Enhanced Supermassive Black Hole Accretion Rates in Post-Merger Galaxies from Cosmological Simulations | Recorded Seminar |
| 29 – 6 – 2022 | James Lane | Picking apart the stellar halo of the Milky Way in the Gaia era | Recorded Seminar |
| 6 – 7 – 2022 | Federico Sestito | Galactic archæology in the Gaia era: tracing the Milky Way assembly with the oldest and most metal-poor stars | Recorded Seminar |
| 13 – 7 – 2022 | Spencer Bialek | Astronomers and their Intelligent Machines: Advancing the Research Pipeline | Recorded Seminar |
| 20 – 7 – 2022 | Logan Francis | Things that go Bump in the Night – Accretion Burst Echoes as Probes of Protostellar Environments | Recorded Seminar |
| 27 – 7 – 2022 | Katie Crotts | A Multi-Wavelength Study of the Highly Asymmetrical Debris Disk Around HD 111520 | Recorded Seminar |
| 3 – 8 – 2022 | Fletcher Waller | A Spookily Good New High-Resolution Optical Spectrograph for Gemini South: Get Inspired to Use GHOST | Recorded Seminar |
| 10 – 8 – 2022 | Ariane Trudeau | Galaxy populations in distant, X-ray selected clusters | Recorded Seminar |
| 17 – 8 – 2022 | Scott Wilkinson | Are all post-starbursts galaxies caused by mergers? An investigation into the triggering of rapid quenching. | Recorded Seminar |
| 24 – 8 – 2022 | Kim Venn | Cancelled | |
| 31 – 8 – 2022 | Max Kurzner | How Clusters of Galaxies Shape Up: Galaxy Morphology with the Next Generation Virgo Survey | CLE A313 |
2021 Presentations
| Date | Speaker | Seminar Title | Link/Location |
| 17 – 05 – 2021 | Jon Willis | Discovering the first cosmic cities: Distant galaxy clusters and the growth of large-scale structure in the Universe. | Recorded Seminar |
| 07 – 06 – 2021 | Doug Rennehan | Mixing Matters | Postponed |
| 14 – 06 – 2021 | Robert Bickley | Machine vision-based studies of post-merger galaxies in observations & simulations | Recorded Seminar |
| 21 – 06 – 2021 | Alan McConnachie | The Milky Way, its satellites, and their analogs in the Local Universe | Recorded Seminar |
| 28 – 06 – 2021 | Cancelled for Extreme Heat | ||
| 05 – 07 – 2021 | Nienke van der Marel | Ice pebble chemistry in a dust trap and its influence on the C/O ratio in a planet-forming disk | Recorded Seminar |
| 12 – 07 – 2021 | Isabel Santos | Magellanic satellites in LCDM cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of the Local Group | Recorded Seminar |
| 19 – 07 – 2021 | Austin Davis | Turbulent convective mixing at the end of a massive stars life: Motivation for multi-physics code validation | Recorded Seminar |
| 26 – 07 – 2021 | Dhruv Muley | Observational Signatures of Planets in Protoplanetary Disks: Temperature structures in spiral arms | |
| 02 – 08 – 2021 | No Seminar | Happy British Columbia Day! | |
| 09 – 08 – 2021 | Megan Donahue | Quenching of Star Formation in Massive Galaxies: Insights from X-ray Observations of their Gas Halos | |
| 16 – 08 – 2021 | Asya Borukhovetskaya | The tidal evolution of the Fornax and Crater II dwarf spheroidals | |
| 23 – 08 – 2021 | Salvatore Quai | The rarity of quenching in simulated post-merger galaxies | |
| 30 – 08 – 2021 | Jess Speedie | Observing planet-driven spiral arms in the dust with ALMA |
2020 Presentations
| Date | Speaker | Seminar Title | Recording / Location |
| 05 – 05 – 2020 | Jon Willis | All These Worlds Are Yours – The Scientific Search for Alien Life. | Recorded Seminar |
| 06 – 05 – 2020 | Falk Herwig | 3D hydrodynamic simulations of core-convection in massive stars: new solutions to an old problem | |
| 13 – 05 – 2020 | Alan McConnachie | Pushing Gaia to the limits: new insights into the outer Galaxy and the Local Group | |
| 20 – 05 – 2020 | JJ Kavelaars | TBD | Recorded Seminar |
| 03 – 06 – 2020 | Arif Babul | Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters | Recorded Seminar |
| 17 – 06 – 2020 | Kim Venn | The Metal Poor Galaxy | Recorded Seminar |
| 24 – 06 – 2020 | Raphael Errani | Tidal stripping 101: substructure abundance and the dark matter halos of Milky Way dwarfs | Recorded Seminar |
| 08 – 07 – 2020 | Clare Higgs | The Stellar Structure of Isolated Local Group Dwarf Galaxies with the Solo Survey | Recorded Seminar |
| 15 – 07 – 2020 | Guillaume Thomas | Reconstructing the history of the Milky Way and probing the dark matter nature with our stellar halo and its structures | Recorded Seminar |
| 22 – 07 – 2020 | Doug Johnstone | Steady Wind-Blown Cavities within Infalling Rotating Envelopes: Application to the Broad Velocity Component in Young Protostars Observed by the Herschel Space Observatory | Recorded Seminar |
| 29 – 07 – 2020 | Maan Hani | The spatially resolved effects of galaxy mergers on star formation and metallicities in IllustrisTNG | |
| 05 – 08 – 2020 | Nienke van der Marel | On the origin, diversity and fate of gapped protoplanetary disks | Recorded Seminar |
| 19 – 08 – 2020 | Toby Brown | Early Results from VERTICO, the Virgo Environment Traced in CO Survey | |
| 02 – 09 – 2020 | Katie Crotts | A Deep Polarimetric Analysis of the Debris Disk HD 106906 |