Current and Upcoming Talks
As we have since the start of the pandemic, the Department of Astronomy will continue to hold its astrophysics seminars jointly with the University of California San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences for the 2022-2023 academic year. Starting in Fall, 2022, the seminars will include a mix of in-person, as well as virtual, talks, with all talks available to watch live through Zoom. The seminars are held on Wednesdays from 3:00 – 4:00 PM. In-person talks take place on the UCSD campus in the Science and Education Research Facility (SERF), Room 383, and SDSU students and faculty are welcome and encouraged to attend — SERF-383 is just a short walk from the UCSD trolley stop, which makes for convenient access via trolley from SDSU. See this link for the schedule of speakers and Zoom connection information.
Past Talks (Pre-Pandemic)
The San Diego State University Department of Astronomy has a joint colloquium series with the Department of Physics. Here, we list colloquia that are part of this series that are of specific relevance to astronomy, along with other departmental talks. Please click on the links (when available) for detailed information about each talk.
- Friday, March 6, 2020 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Coral Wheeler (UCSD)
- Friday, February 21, 2020 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Xavier Prochaska (UCSC)
- Friday, November 8, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room P-149): Colloquium, Dr. Christopher Theissen (UCSD)
- Friday, November 1, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. William Welsh (SDSU)
- Friday, October 18, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Daniel Gruen (SLAC)
- Friday, October 11, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Aida Kirichenko (UNAM)
- Friday, October 4, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Bryce Bolin (Caltech)
- Monday, July 1, 2019 (1:00 PM in Room PA-215): Master’s Thesis Defense, Mr. Michael Engesser (SDSU)
- Friday, May 17, 2019 (2:00 PM in Room P-244): Virtual Reality Demonstration, Mr. Gur Windmiller (SDSU)
- Friday, May 10, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Jerry Orosz (SDSU)
- Friday, April 26, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Mr. Pat Boyce (Boyce Research Initiatives and Education Foundation)
- Friday, March 22, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Quinn Konopacky (UC San Diego)
- Friday, March 8, 2019 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Joseph Hennawi (UC Santa Barbara)
- Friday, December 7, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room RA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Alison Coil (UC San Diego)
- Friday, November 30, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Andrew Friedman (UC San Diego)
- Friday, November 16, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Charles Steinhardt (Dark Cosmology Centre)
- Friday, November 9, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Brian Siana (UC Riverside)
- Friday, October 26, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Sean Mills (Caltech)
- Friday, October 19, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. J. Xavier Prochaska (UC Santa Cruz)
- Friday, September 28, 2018 (2:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Brian Keating (UC San Diego)
- Friday, September 7, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Alexie Leauthaud (UC Santa Cruz)
- Friday, June 8, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Joseph Burchett (UC Santa Cruz)
- Friday, May 11, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Jessica Werk (University of Washington)
- Friday, April 20, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Student Presentations
- Friday, April 13, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Joey Fedro (Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics)
- Friday, March 2, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Mariko Kato (Keio University, Japan)
- Friday, January 26, 2018 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Stella Kafka (Director of American Association of Variable Star Observers)
- Friday, November 17, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Karin Sandstrom (UC San Diego)
- Friday, November 3, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PS-256): Astr 101 Workshop, Dr. Phil Blanco (Grossmont College)
- Friday, October 27, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Martin Henze (SDSU)
- Friday, October 13, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Nick Law (University of North Carolina)
- Friday, September 22, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Warren Skidmore (Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory)
- Friday, May 19, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Jon Mauerhan (University of California, Berkeley)
“Tracing the Shapes of Supernovae with Spectropolarimetry”
- Friday, May 5, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Rychard Bouwens (University of Leiden)
“Young Galaxies Forming in the High-Redshift Universe”
- Friday, April 21, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Joshua Pepper (Lehigh University)
“The Next Stage of Exoplanet Discovery”
- Friday, April 28, 2017 (6:30 PM in Room GMCS-333): John D. Schopp Memorial Lecture, Dr. Jess McIver (California Institute of Technology)
“LIGO and the Beginning of Gravitational Wave Astronomy”
- Friday, April 14, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Joseph Dolan (San Diego State University)
“Pauli’s Only Mistake: The Aberration of Starlight”
- Friday, February 24, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Milva Orsaria (CONICET/National University of La Plata)
“Quark Matter and its Role for the Core Compositions of Neutron Stars”
- Friday, March 3, 2017 (1:00 PM — note special time! — in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Takashi Moriya (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)
“Supernovae Exploding in Dense Circumstellar Media”
- Friday, January 20, 2017 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Norman Murray (University of Toronto)
“Star Formation on Scales Large and Small”
- Friday, November 18, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Luigi Gallo (Saint Mary’s University)
“Revealing the Innermost Regions of Active Galactic Nuclei”
- Monday, November 14, 2016 (12:30 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Nadia Blagorodnova (California Institute of Technology)
“Luminous Red Novae: The Cool Transients”
- Wednesday, September 21, 2016 (12:30 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Jeff Cooke (Swinburne University of Technology) and J. Chuck Horst (San Diego State University)
“The Deeper, Wider, Faster program – Chasing the fastest bursts in the Universe”
- Monday, September 12, 2016 (12:30 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Matt Darnley (Liverpool John Moores University)
“Accrete, accrete, accrete…..Bang! (and repeat): The remarkable Recurrent Novae”
- Friday, August 5, 2016 (1:00 PM in Room PA-215): Master’s Thesis Talk, Kelsi Flatland (SDSU)
“SN 2014cx: A Case Study of a Normal Type II-Plateau Supernova”
- Monday, June 20, 2016 (1:00 PM in Room PA-215): Master’s Thesis Talk, Harish Khandrika (SDSU)
“Optical and Near-Infrared Photometric Observations of Supernovae Using
CCD2005 and the NIRIM Infrared Imager”
- Friday, June 17, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Schuyler D. Van Dyk (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology)
“Supernova Progenitors and Their Binary Companions”
- Friday, April 29, 2016 (7:30 PM in Room GMCS-333): John D. Schopp Memorial Lecture, Prof. Rudi Lindner (University of Michigan) “From Berlin to Dallas: The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Cosmology in the
Twentieth Century
- Friday, April 29, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Gregg Hallinan (California Institute of Technology)
“All the Sky, All the Time: The Owens Valley LWA”
- Friday, March 18, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room P-146 *NOTE ROOM CHANGE*): Colloquium, Prof. Alexander Rudolph (California State Polytechnic University)
“CAMPARE and Cal-Bridge: Two Synergistic Programs Forming a Successful
New Model for Promoting Participation of Women and Underrepresented
Minority Students in Astronomy”
- Friday, March 11, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Branimir Sesar (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
“Surveying the Galaxy with RR Lyrae Stars”
- Monday, March 7, 2016 (3:30 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Jonathan Trump (Pennsylvania State University)
“The Birth and Growth of Supermassive Black Holes: Coming of Age with Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Surveys”
- Friday, March 4, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Yicheng Guo (Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz)
“Distant Low-mass Galaxies as an Incisive Tool to Explore Galaxy Formation and Evolution”
- Friday, February 26, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Kate Rubin (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
“Mapping the Cool Baryons: Toward a Physical Picture for Galaxy Evolution”
- Friday, February 19, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Sebastiano Cantalupo (Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich)
“A 3D View of the Dark Universe: Illuminating Intergalactic Gas at High Redshift with Fluorescent Lyman-Alpha Emission”
- Friday, January 8, 2016 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium (4 short talks) — Prof. Nader Haghighipour (IfA), Dr. Veselin Kostov (Goddard), Dr. Billy Quarles (U. Nebraska at Kearney), and Prof. Daniel Fabrycky (U. Chicago)Â
“A Four-Part Circumbinary Planet Medley”
- Friday, October 23, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Eric Sandquist (San Diego State University)
“Precise Star Clocks in Astronomy”
- Friday, October 2, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. G. Grant Williams (University of Arizona/MMT Observatory)
“Probing the Three Dimensional Nature of Supernova Explosions; Results from the Supernova Spectropolarimetry Project (SNSPOL)”
- Tuesday, September 22, 2015 (4:00 PM in Room PA-215): Master’s Thesis Talk, Stephanie Lauber (SDSU)
“The Spatial Distribution of Novae in M31 from the Research-Based Science Education Program”
- Friday, September 18, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Breanna Binder (University of Washington)
“The Supernova Impostor SN 2010da”
- Friday, September 4, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Andy Howell (Las Cumbres Observatory)
“Revealing the Progenitors of Supernovae with a Global Robotic Telescope” Network
- Thursday, June 18, 2015 (11:00 AM in Room PA-215): Master’s Thesis Talk, Susan Kurth (SDSU)
“An Investigation of Higher-Order Effects in Modeling Exoplanet HAT-P-7b”
- Friday, April 24, 2015 (7:30 PM in Room GMCS-333): John D. Schopp Memorial Lecture, Prof. Shrinivas Kulkarni (California Institute of Technology)
“The Restless Universe (Palomar Transient Factory)”
- Friday, April 17, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Josh Simon (Carnegie Institution of Washington)
“The High Redshift Universe Next Door”
- Friday, February 20, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Saeqa Vrtilek (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
“A Hertsprung-Russell Diagram for X-ray Binaries?”
- Friday, February 13, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Caitlin Casey (University of California, Irvine)
“Getting the Census Right: The History of Cosmic Star-Formation and Importance of Galaxy Mergers (or not)”
- Friday, February 6, 2015 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Daniel Fabrycky (University of Chicago)
“Architecture and Timing of Planetary Systems”
- Wednesday, January 14, 2015 (2:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Dr. Veselin Kostov (U. Toronto)
“Circumbinary Planets — Discovery and Characterization”
- Thursday, December 4, 2014 (11:00 AM in Room PA-256): Master’s Thesis Talk, Chris Gabler (SDSU)
“The Initial-Final Mass Relation for White Dwarfs using Old Open Clusters”
- Monday, November 17, 2014 (3:30 PM in Room PA-256): Master’s Thesis Talk, Chris Curtin (SDSU)
“Exploring the Role of Globular Cluster Specific Frequency on the Luminosity Specific Nova Rate in Three Virgo Elliptical Galaxies”
- Friday, November 14, 2014 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. Adam Burgasser (UCSD)
“Lithium in Halo L Subdwarfs: Using Nearby Brown Dwarfs to Probe Li Production in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis”
- Thursday, November 13, 2014 (7:30 PM in Room NE-060): Public Talk, Dr. Jeffrey Bennett
“What is Relativity? An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas and Why They Matter”
- Friday, October 3, 2014 (3:00 PM in Room PA-215): Colloquium, Prof. William Welsh (SDSU)
“Kepler Circumbinary Planets – The Best of Both Worlds”