Welcome to Durham Astronomy Girls’ Day
Durham Astronomy Girls’ Day is a one-day event aimed at KS3 girls (and those who identify as female) from County Durham Schools. The yearly event is held at Durham University and at its core lies the wish to inspire the future generation of female scientists. Please get in touch if you would like to have more information and /or would like to get your school involved! Due to COVID-19, the next Durham Astronomy Girls’ Day is now postponed to February 2023.
Learn more about the research done by the Astronomy group in Durham by clicking the button below!
International Day of Women and Girls in Science [11 February, 2023]
February 11th, is International Day of Women and Girls in Science and we would like to invite you to celebrate this occasion with us! You can ask us any question about space and astronomy by sending your questions here. We will have a team of Durham astronomers ready to answer them during the course of the day and until Sunday, February 13th. Throughout the day we will feature some of our brilliant female Durham astronomers and role models on our Twitter account with pictures and short bios. Also check out events organized by the International Astronomical Union in the period of February 11th to March 8th, you can find more information on this page.
Make sure you follow our “Ask an Astronomer Q&A” live event on Twitter on the day!
Meet the Team
Learn more about the amazing science done by our event organising team!
Dr. Anna McLeod
Anna is an assistant professor studying how the most massive stars in the Universe regulate the evolution of galaxies and the formation of new generations of stars. Anna is passionate about outreach and bringing Astronomy closer to the public, and the initiator of Durham Astronomy Girls’ Day.
Dr. Andreia Carrillo
Andreia is a Galactic archaeologist who studies the formation of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, using stars as a fossil record. She is interested in the Milky Way’s stellar halo. The stellar halo is a graveyard for stars that once belonged to a different galaxy but were cannibalized by the Milky Way in the process of its formation.
Dr. Alis Deason
Alis is an associate professor who studies the formation and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, near-field cosmology, and the nature of dark matter.
Dr. Victoria Fawcett
Vicky is a postdoctoral researcher at Newcastle University working on quasars: one of the brightest objects in the Universe. She uses different wavelengths of light to understand the physics of quasars and explore how they are important in galaxy evolution.
Dr. Lorraine Coghill
Lorraine is an outreach & engagement specialist, creating opportunities for people from all walks of life to work together on creative science & arts programmes in schools, universities, science centres, and festivals. Lorraine loves the fact that every day is different, meeting and working with so many amazing and inspiring people.
Dr. Guillaume Mahler
Guillaume is currently a postdoc at Durham University. His career has allowed him to travel and live in different countries and widen his science interests going from investigating the nature of dark matter to observing the ultraviolet light emitted by the first stars. Outside of work Guillaume enjoys playing saxophone and hiking in the forest.
Zoe Le Conte
Zoe is a first year PhD student at Durham, where she observes galaxies in the local Universe. The majority of spiral disc galaxies create a bar through their centres for stability, but at distances further away, there is a lower number of barred galaxies. By mapping the motion of stars and gas in galaxies she hopes to find out why galaxies form bars. Outside of research Zoe likes art, football and travelling.
Sarah Johnston
Sarah is a first year PhD student studying how to use GPU devices to accelerate astronomical codes. Her work focuses on the SWIFT hydrodynamics code and she hopes to use this in the future to further probe cosmology and dark matter in large scale structure.
Dr. Nicole Thomas
Nicole is a researcher at Durham where she uses simulations to study the ways supermassive black holes grow and launch the jets we observe with radio telescopes. From Cape Town, South Africa, Nicole is a member of Astronomy in Colour, a community working to transform astronomy and provide a safe space to uplift women and non-binary astronomers of colour.
Dr. Ellen Sirks
Ellen studies dark matter by building ‘fake’ (simulated) galaxies in computers and studying their properties. She also works for the SuperBIT telescope, which will observe the sky while floating 30km above the Earth while suspended by a very large balloon! SuperBIT will help us understand where exactly in large groups of galaxies this mysterious dark matter is located.
Dr. Annagrazia Puglisi
Annagrazia is an observational astronomer and uses the largest telescopes in the world to understand how galaxies of the distant Universe form and stop forming their stars. Before moving to Durham, she lived and worked in Munich and Paris. She cares a lot about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Astronomy, and enjoys learning languages, travelling, capoeira, baking and cooking.
Dr. Azadeh Fattahi
Azi is an assistant professor in at Durham University. and works on the formation and evolution of galaxies and dark matter in the Universe, using computer models. She was born and raised in Iran and did her first university degree there. Azi then moved to Canada and got her PhD there, before joining Durham university 4 years ago.
Dr. Leah Morabito
Leah investigates how active super-massive black holes in distant galaxies impact the growth of their host galaxies. She is a world leading expert in high resolution imaging at FM radio frequencies with the Low Frequency ARray (LOFAR).
Dr. Ting-Yun (Sunny) Cheng
Sunny is a Taiwanese astrophysicist and machine learner. She uses artificial intelligence to teach computers classifying galaxies and analysing their properties. Her science interests are to understand why galaxies look similar or different from each other and how galaxies are formed and evolved. When she is not doing science, she enjoys playing volleyball, video games, and travelling.
Prof. Paula Chadwick
Paula helps to build a new telescopes to detect high-energy radiation from some of the most powerful objects in the Universe. See here for lots more information about what she does: https://www.cta-observatory.org/.
Dr. Mathilde Jauzac
Mathilde is an Associate Professor at Durham. She studied in France, and worked in South Africa before moving to the UK. She is fascinated by galaxy clusters and the way they bend light around them ‘illuminating’ Dark Matter! Apart from astronomy, she is also a big fan of travels (even more when it’s warm and sunny), painting, drawing, rugby, family and friends.
Dr. Isabel Santos-Santos
Isabel uses computer simulations to study what the smallest galaxies in the Universe (called ‘dwarf’ galaxies) can tell us about dark matter and how our own Galaxy the Milky Way formed. She did her PhD in Spain and worked in Canada before moving to Durham. She loves football, painting and singing.
Dr. Sownak Bose
Sownak studies how galaxies are distributed on the largest scales in the Universe, and tries to work out how these objects can be used to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy.