Kavli Science Journalism Workshop

Monday, June 25

6:00–9:00pm

Welcoming dinner at the Blue Room, Kendall Square

Tuesday, June 26 —What's Old

9:00–9:15

Welcome, and introdution to the workshop
Boyce Rensberger

9:15–10:00

Introduction to the universe
Paul Schechter

10:15–12:00

What we know about stars and the Milky Way
Adam Burgasser

1:30–3:00

What we know about planets in our solar system
Richard Binzel

3:15–5:00

What we know about galaxies and the universe
Paul Schechter

Wednesday, June 27—What's New I

9:00–10:30

Characterizing planets beyond our solar system
Sara Seager

10:30–12:00

Shop talk among journalists
What are the difficulties each of us encounters when trying to cover these things?

1:40–3:30

Black holes and what we're learning about them
Scott Hughes

3:45–5:30

Supermassive black holes that inhabit active galactic nuclei
Juna Kollmeier, Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena

Thursday, June 28—What's new II

9:00–10:30

In the beginning: The origin of the universe
Edmund Bertschinger

10:45–12:15

The universe grows to its present middle age
James Bullock

New projects, new devices

1:35–2:35

Dark matter detector
Peter Fisher

2:35–3:35

Radio astronomy
James Moran

3:45–4:45

X-ray astronomy
Claude Canizares

4:55–6:00

Optical astronomy (LSST, GSMT, JWST)
Wendy Freedman

Edmund Bertschinger, Kavli Scholar and MIT Kavli Institute professor of physics and head of the astrophysics division. His research interests focus on cosmology and relativistic astrophysics.

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Richard Binzel, MIT Kavli Institute professor of planetary science. He specializes in the origin and evolution of asteroids. Binzel invented the Torino Scale that is used to categorize the impact hazards of asteroids and other objects that could strike the Earth. He was on the Planet Definition Committee that ruled on the nomenclatural status of Pluto.

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James Bullock, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at University of California–Irvine. He studies how gallaxies and their constituent dark matter halos form and evolve over billions of years, with the help of computer simulations and analytic models.

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Adam Burgasser, assistant professor of physics at MIT’s Kavli Institute. He specializes in the physics and properties of stars, especially the relatively low-mass objects called brown dwarfs. These are many times bigger than the biggest planets but smaller than typical stars. They have too little mass to undergo nuclear fusion.

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Claude Canizares, professor of physics and MIT Kavli Institute associate director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center and the Vice President for Research and Associate Provost at MIT. Canizares’s main research interests are high resolution x-ray spectroscopy and plasma diagnostics of supernova remnants and clusters of galaxies, X-ray studies of dark matter, X-ray properties of quasars and active galactic nuclei, and observational cosmology.

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Peter Fisher, Kavli scholar and professor of physics at MIT Kavli Institute. He is primarily involved in the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment, which will make high precision measurements of cosmic rays. Current interests also include development of new particle detectors, embedding processors in detector systems.

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Wendy Freedman, director of Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena. Recently, Freedman has worked on a collaborative study of the acceleration of the universe as part of the 5-year, NSF-funded Carnegie Supernova Project.

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Scott Hughes, assistant professor of physics at the MIT Kavli Instutue for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research is in astrophysical general relativity, focusing in particular upon black holes and gravitational-wave sources.

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Juna Kollmeier, postdoctoral fellow with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. She specializes in powerful objects such as black holes, quasars and active galactic nuclei. These are supermassive black holes at the centers of the largest galaxies. They give off more energy than all the stars of the rest of the galaxy.

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James Moran, professor of astrophysics at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge. He uses radio astronomy for such projects as The SAMBA survey (Smithsonian Astronomical and Maser and Black hole All-sky survey).

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Boyce Rensberger, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT. He has been a science writer for over 35 years.

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Paul Schechter, Kavli Scholar and MIT Kavli Institute professor of astrophysics. Schechter studies galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the distribution of dark matter therein. He is primarily an observational astronomer who works with both ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. His annual “Introduction to the Universe” is an annual hit with Knight Fellows.

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Sara Seager, associate professor of planetary sciences at MIT. Her specialty is extrasolar planets, that is, planets orbiting stars other than our own. She searches for them and models their characteristics. Seager also studies the early universe when electrons and protons first combined to form hydrogen and helium.

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