Monday 18, Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 September 2006
Organised by Professor Martin Rees PRS, Professor Len Culhane FRS, Professor Keith Mason and Professor Alan Wells
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Dr David Burrows (Speaker)
David Burrows is Senior Scientist and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he was a student of Bill Kraushaar. Dr Burrows is the head of the Swift X-ray Telescope team and also leads the Swift Science Operations Team. His research interests include the interstellar medium, supernova remnants, and gamma-ray burst afterglows.
Professor Len Culhane FRS (Organiser)
Len Culhane was born in Dublin in October 1937. Following a first degree at University College Dublin, he completed a PhD at University College London (UCL) in 1966. His thesis dealt with early Solar X-ray observations using the UK/US Ariel I spacecraft launched in 1962. Apart from a year as Senior Scientist at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory (1969-70), he has continued to work at UCL. He was elected FRS in 1985. Currently professor of Physics, he was Director of the College's Mullard Space Science Laboratory (1983-2003) and Head, Department of Space and Climate Physics (1993-2003). He has worked in X-ray Astronomy supernovae, galaxy clusters and active galaxies; studied the Sun's corona at X-ray and extreme UV wavelengths and developed a range of novel instrumentation for X-ray detection and spectroscopy. He has been Principal Investigator for instruments on several US, ESA and Japanese missions and currently leads an international team that is building an extreme UV spectrometer for launch on Japan's Solar-B mission in 2006. He has been active in several national and international bodies. In the UK, these have included chairman, SERC Space Science Programme Board (1989-92) and member, PPARC council (1996-2000). Among international appointments, he was UK delegate and Vice-President for the ESA Science Programme Committee (1991-94), chair of the ESF European Space Science Committee (1998-2002) and chair of COSPAR Commission E (1994-2002). He currently chairs the Science Committee of the International Space Science Institute in Bern (2006 - ) and the UK Space Academic Network (2005 - ). He is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and of the Academia Europea. He holds an honorary doctorate of science of the University of Wroclaw in Poland and is a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Dr Neil Gehrels (Speaker and Chair)
Dr Neil Gehrels is head of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and is Adjunct Professor at University of Maryland and Penn State University. He is Principal Investigator of NASA's SWIFT observatory which was launched in November 2004 and Deputy Project Scientist for GLAST which will launch in 2007. His research involves building space flight instruments to observe astronomical objects and interpreting data from them. The emphasis of his research is on explosive events in the cosmos such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. He received his PhD in physics at Caltech in 1982 and has been an astrophysicist at Goddard since that time. He was Project Scientist for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory during its operations from 1991 to 2000.
Dr Giancarlo Ghirlanda (Speaker)
2003 PhD in Astrophysics at Sissa (Trieste)
1999 Laurea in Astronomy at the Universita' degli studi di Bologna Professional History
2003-2005 Post-Doc at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera
2006-present: Research Astronomer at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera
Current research interests:
High energy astrophysics;
Temporal and spectral properties of Gamma Ray Bursts;
Models of the GRB prompt emission;
Cosmological use of Gamma Ray Bursts.
Professor Jim Hough FRS (Speaker)
Jim Hough has been active in the search for gravitational waves for 
the past 35 years. Currently he is the principal investigator in the UK for the UK/German GEO 600 experiment, is very active in developments for an upgrade to the US LIGO observatories, and is a member of the LISA International Science Team.
Elected to the Royal Society in 2003, he is currently a member of PPARC Council.
Professor Don Lamb (Speaker)
Donald Q Lamb is the Louis Block Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the 
University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was an Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Marshall Scholar, an NSF Predoctoral Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His current interests include gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and galaxy clusters. He is the author of more than 300 papers and the coeditor of several books on theoretical astrophysics. He has made important contributions to the structure and evolution of white dwarfs and neutron stars, and to compact X-ray sources, gamma-ray bursts, and supernovae. He helped found and continues to play a significant role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Professor Lamb is Mission Scientist for the High-Energy Transient Explorer, a Swift Associate Scientist, and Director of the DOE ASC / Alliance Flash Center at the University of Chicago.
Dr Davide Lazzati (Speaker)
Born in Como, Italy, in 1971, Davide Lazzati studied at the local Scientific High School, where he graduated in 1991. He studied physics at the University of Milan and in Como. He graduated in 
1996 with a thesis on the structure of X-ray clusters of galaxies under the supervision of R Giacconi and G Chincarini. He then moved to the study of Gamma-Ray bursts during the PhD years, when he worked mainly with G Ghisellini on theoretical aspects of the various phases of the GRB phenomenon. His PhD thesis, discussed in 2000, was awarded the "Gratton Prize" as the best Italian thesis in astronomy in the two previous academic years. He spent four years at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, working with Martin Rees PRS on GRB related phenomena and moved in 2004 to JILA, University of Colorado, to work with Mitch Begelman and his group. His interests concentrate on relativistic astrophysics, radiation mechanisms and cosmology.
Professor Peter Mészáros (Chair)
Peter Mészáros received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, and is currently the Eberly Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and concurrently Professor of Physics, having served as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics during 1993-2003 at The Pennsylvania State University, which he joined in 1983. Previously he was on the permanent scientific staff of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, after postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and Cambridge University. He has held long term visiting appointments at the NASA Goddard High Energy Astrophysics Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge University, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, UCSB. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the recipient of the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, as well as of Guggenheim, Royal Society, Smithsonian and NAS/NRC fellowships. His main research interests are high energy astrophysics and cosmology. Among his most important work are the formulation of the development of cosmological perturbations in cold dark matter and radiation dominated universes, proposing and developing, with Professor Martin Rees PRS, the cosmological fireball shock scenario of gamma-ray bursts, which is widely used for interpreting observations of these objects, and the investigation of the production of ultra-high energy neutrinos in gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.
Dr Paul O'Brien (Speaker)
Dr Paul O'Brien is a Senior Lecturer in the X-ray and Observational Astronomy Group, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester. Prior to that he worked at the University of Oxford and University College London. Leicester provided the X-ray camera for Swift and hosts the UK Swift Data Centre. He is a member of the Swift Science Team and the Faulkes Telescope GRB team. His research areas include Gamma-ray Bursts, Active Galactic Nuclei and interacting galaxies. Paul O'Brien is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the American Astronomical Society and a member of the International Astronomical Union.
For GRBs, he is particularly interested in the origin of the X-ray
emission and how it relates to the optical/IR emission seen from
bursts. The early data provided by Swift, when combined with other
telescopes, probes both the jet physics and the surroundings of the GRB progenitor.
Professor Tsvi Piran (Speaker)
Tsvi Piran holds the Schartzmann University chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a native of Israel and a graduate of the Hebrew University. After carrying his PhD under the supervision of Professor Jacob Shaham and Professor Joseph Katz he was a research associate at Oxford and Texas and then a long term member at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Piran is a faculty member at the Hebrew University since 1981. He was a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia and NYU. In 2004 he was awarded the Distinguished Moore Scholarship at Caltech.
Piran's research involved a very wide range of topics in Relativistic Astrophysics, Cosmology and Theoretical Physics. He was among the Pioneers of Numerical Relativity (the art of numerical solution of Einstein's equations). Together with Richard Stark he was the first to calculate the gravitational radiation emission during the formation of a rotating black hole. In the late eighties Piran, together with Eichler, Livio and Schramm suggested that cosmological neutron star mergers produce Gamma-ray bursts. These mergers are now generally accepted as the sources of short GRBs. His research in the early nineties on Gamma-Ray bursts has led to the current understanding of this phenomenon within the context of the fireball model. Among his major contributions within this field are: the concept of the internal-external shocks model; the prediction of an optical flashes that accompany GRBs; the prediction of jet breaks and their application to the estimate the beaming angle and the basic synchrotron theory of afterglow emission and light curves. In addition Piran's work span a wide range of issues in Relativistic Astrophysics from voids in the large scale structure via inflation and the early Universe to the stability of accretion disk. He has also worked on theoretical issues like Regge calculus, the Choptuik phenomenon, the structure of higher dimensional black holes and the possibility of Lorentz violation.
Professor Martin Rees PRS (Organiser)
Martin Rees is President of the Royal Society and also Master of Trinity College, and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He is also Visiting Professor at Leicester University and Imperial College London. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995, and was nominated to the House of Lords in 2005 as a cross-bench peer.
Lord Rees studied at Cambridge University and then held post-doctoral positions at Cambridge, California and Princeton before becoming a Professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, a post he held for eighteen years. For ten years he was director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy.
Professor Rees has worked and travelled extensively overseas. He has been a Visiting Professor at many universities including Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, Kyoto and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton where he is now a trustee. He was Regents Fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington between 1984 and 1988 and is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, and honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy, and a number of other foreign academies.
Lord Rees' current research deals with cosmology and astrophysics, especially gamma ray bursts, galactic nuclei, black hole formation and radiative processes (including gravitational waves) and also cosmic structure formation, especially the early generation of stars and galaxies that formed at the end of the cosmic dark ages' more than 12 billion years ago relatively shortly after the "Big Bang". He has authored or co-authored about five hundred research papers. He has lectured, broadcast and written widely on science and policy, and is the author of seven books for a general readership.
His recent awards include the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize and lecture for science communication (2004), and the Royal Swedish Academy's Crafoord Prize (2005). Other notable awards include the Heinemann Prize (1984), the Balzan Prize (1989), the Bower Award of the Franklin Institute (1998), the Einstein Award from the World Cultural Council (2003) and the UNESCO Neils Bohr Medal (2005).
Lord Rees was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 and served as a member of its Council between 1983-85 and 1993-95. He held a Royal Society Research Professorship between 1992 and 2004. He is married to Professor Caroline Humphrey, FBA.
Dr Nial Tanvir (Speaker)
Nial Tanvir obtained his PhD from the University of Durham in 1992 where he worked on the extragalactic distance scale. He went on to a postdoc at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and then to a faculty position at the University of Hertfordshire.
He has recently been appointed to the Chair of Observational Astronomy at the University of Leicester. In addition to gamma-ray bursts, his research interests include the structure and dynamics of nearby and distant galaxies.
Dr Eli Waxman (Speaker)
Professor Eli Waxman was born in Petach-Tikva, Israel, in 1965. Eli Waxman gained his high education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has graduated (BSc) in mathematics and physics, and MSc in physics, summa cum laude, jointly with his service in the IDF, within the framework of the prestigious Talpiot Program. In 1994 he has completed his PhD thesis "Self-similar solutions to Euler's equations" under the supervision of Professors D Shvarts, NRCN, and G Rakavy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1994 to 1998 he was a long term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In 1998 Eli Waxman returned to Israel and joined the Physics Faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he serves presently as Professor of Physics.
His main fields of interest are high-energy neutrino astronomy, gamma-ray bursts, high-energy cosmic rays and structure formation and non-thermal processes in the inter-galactic medium. Eli Waxman is married to Vered, and he is the father to Iddo (14) and Chen (16).
Professor Alan Wells (Organiser and Chair)
Emeritus Professor and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow at the University of Leicester and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University.
Founding Director of the Space Research Centre of the University of Leicester until September 2003, incorporating the role of UK-lead Investigator for the X-ray telescope on the SWIFT mission, which was launched in November 2004. Since launch, has taken tours of duty as SWIFT Science Director at the SWIFT Mission Operations Centre at Penn State University. The X-ray telescope makes major contributions to the many SWIFT gamma ray burst detections and discoveries.
Non-Executive Director of the National Space Centre; the £60M landmark project in Leicester for education and public understanding of space science and astronomy. Over 87000 school children and 4000 teachers participated in the education programmes of the National Space Centre in 2005.
International representative on the Board of Trustees of the Universities Space research Association, based in Columbia, MD.
Ralph Wijers (Speaker)
Ralph Wijers graduated from Leiden Observatory in 1987 and got
his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, with Professors Van den Heuvel and Van Paradijs. After postdoctoral fellowships in Princeton and Cambridge, he became assistant professor at SUNY Stony Brook in 1998. Since 2002, he holds the Chair of High-Energy Astrophysics at the Astronomical Institute `Anton Pannekoek' of the University of Amsterdam.
Dr Stanford Woosley (Speaker)
Stan Woosley, a theoretical astrophysicist, is a leading authority on 
supernovae, nuclear astrophysics, and gamma-ray bursts. His work on the evolution of massive stars and their explosion as supernovae describes how the "heavy" elements needed for life, such as oxygen and iron, are forged and ejected. In addition, Woosley's "collapsar" model of massive star explosions has been identified as the central engine of certain types of gamma-ray bursts in which a huge dying star collapses into a central black hole. For work in these areas, Woosley received the American Physical Society's Hans Bethe Prize in Nuclear Astrophysics, as well as the American Astronomical Society's Bruno Rossi Prize, in 2005. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Before joining the UCSC faculty in 1975, Woosley obtained the PhD degree at Rice University in 1971, and worked for three years as a postdoc in nuclear physics with Willy Fowler at Cal Tech.