fall-2018

We are pleased to welcome Brian McNamara! Brian McNamara is Professor and University Research Chair in Physics & Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, at Ontario, Canada.  He serves as Chair of the Physics & Astronomy Department and was formerly director of the Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute,  which is the largest graduate program in physics & astronomy in Canada, and one of the largest in the world.  He is an Affiliate of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.  After receiving a PhD at the University of Virginia in 1991, McNamara took a postdoctoral fellowship in the Netherlands at the Kapteyn Laboratory at Groningen.  From 1993 to 2000 he was a staff member at the Chandra X-ray Center and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  From 2000 to 2006,  McNamara was a professor at Ohio University.  Since 2006 he has taught physics and astronomy at at the University of Waterloo, where he remains today.  

McNamara studies galaxies and clusters of galaxies.  He is interested in how they form and evolve under the influence of powerful radio jets launched by supermassive black holes. His most recent work involves making measurements with the earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the newly commissioned Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which is the most powerful telescope in existence.  He served on the science team of the Hitomi X-ray observatory and currently on the XARM observatory, which is Hitomi’s successor.

Brian will deliver the keynote address on Saturday entitled “Supermassive Black Holes: The Hearts of Galaxies”

Program Overview

Location: 

Sessions and workshops will take place in the Dow Rotunda within the R. B. Annis Math/Science Division building.  For campus maps and directions to the campus, please visit http://www.interlochen.org/map 

Registration: 

Registration cost is $10 per meeting.  Students and first-time attendees, though, may attend free of charge. 

Parking: 

Please refer to the map above for parking

Lunch: 

Lunch will be held in the IAA cafeteria. It will cost $5 per person and will feature two hot lunch options, a deli counter, a salad bar, and special diet options. 

Hotels: 

For those who wish to stay overnight for the meeting, local hotel information for both on- and off-campus lodging can be found online at http://www.interlochen.org/lodging