Contact EAS

Council

Contact individual council members:

▾ Roger Davies (UK) — President (since 2017, Vice-President 2012-2017)

Responsibility: Chair Council meetings, Business meetings with the Affiliated Societies, and the annual General Assembly; Link to the University of Geneva and EAS Office; Liaison with IAU, AAS, AfAS

Roger Davies was the Philip Wetton Professor and Head of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford until 2022 and President of the Royal Astronomical Society for 2010-12. He grew up in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire attending the John Leggott School going on to read Physics at University College London. He started research working on galaxy dynamics in Cambridge in the 1970s after which he moved to California before spending 6 years on the staff of the US National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. As part of the "7 Samurai" team he worked out a new way of measuring the distances to galaxies and discovered the "Great Attractor", a huge concentration of galaxy clusters in the southern sky. He moved to Oxford in 1988 to lead the UK's participation in the construction of the 8m Gemini telescopes, in Hawaii and Chile. In 1994 he took up the post of Professor of Astronomy at Durham University returning to Oxford in 2002 where he was Chairman of the Physics Department from 2005-10. His research interests centre on cosmology and how galaxies form and evolve. He has a longstanding interest in astronomical instruments & telescopes. In recent years he has pioneered the use of a new class of astronomical spectrograph to measure the masses and ages of galaxies, as well as search for black holes in their nuclei.

▸ Sara Lucatello (Italy) — Vice-President (since 2018)

Responsibility: EAS Annual Meeting Board; Liaison with ASTRONET; Satellite Constellations Working Group; Diversity & Inclusion and Advisory Committee; Link to COPUOUS; Social media presence

Sara Lucatello works at the INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova. She obtained her undergraduate degree and PhD from University of Padova, Italy. After postdoctoral work at University of Texas Austin, she was INAF fellow in Padova and later Excellence Cluster Universe fellow in Munich. She joined the faculty at INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova in 2006. She served as a member of the science teams in the SDSS surveys SEGUE-2 and APOGEE and is currently a member of the Galactic Archeology steering committee of European survey WEAVE, where she also coordinates the calibration teams. She has served as a member and co-chair of the Committee of Participation of Women in Sloan and as a member of the Committee for Inclusion in Sloan, the organs for diversity and equal opportunities in the SDSS collaboration. Her scientific interests focus on spectroscopic studies of stellar populations, the formation and chemo-dynamical evolution of the Milky Way and its subcomponents, large Galactic stellar surveys and Big Data in Astronomy.

▸ Lex Kaper (The Netherlands) — Vice-President (since 2020; Councillor 2016-2020)

Responsibility: Chairman of EAS Annual Meeting board

Lex Kaper is a Professor of Astronomy at the Anton Pannekoek Institute of the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD in astronomy at the University of Amsterdam in 1993. He moved to the European Southern Observatory Headquarters and spent there 4 years as a (senior) postdoctoral fellow. In 1998 he was awarded a 5-year Royal Academy fellowship and returned to the University of Amsterdam. In 2005 he obtained a professorship at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests focus on massive stars, their formation, evolution and fate. He is involved in the development of astronomical instrumentation: he is the NL-PI of the optical to near-infrared X-shooter spectrograph on the ESO Very Large Telescope an co-PI of MOSAIC, a multi-object spectrograph under development for the European Extremely Large Telescope. Lex Kaper is a member of the IAU Membership Committee and Secretary of the Nederlands Comite Astronomie.

▸ Inma Dominguez (Spain) — Secretary (since 2020; Councillor 2019-2020)

Responsibility: Liaison with Affiliated Societies; Liaison with African Astronomical Society; European Parliament

Inma Dominguez is Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Granada (UGR). She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of La Laguna and her PhD from the University of Barcelona (1991). Inma has worked on Type Ia Supernovae since her doctoral thesis and on stellar evolution since her postdoc at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale (Frascati, Italy), being a frequent research visitor at the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico d'Abruzzo, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago. Together with other colleagues, in 2010 she founded the Azarquiel School of Astronomy, a scientific bridge between Eastern and Western cultures. She served as Director for Internationalization at the School for Postgraduate Studies of UGR (2011-2015) and has been member of the Organization Committee of the IAU Commission Stellar Constitution (2012-2015).

▸ Nick Kylafis (Greece) — Treasurer (since 2019, Councillor 2018-2019)

Responsibility: Finances, incl. EAS annual meetings; Recruitment of Organisational members

Nick Kylafis was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech (1979 - 1981) and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1981 - 1984). Then, he was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University (1984 - 1985) before accepting an Assistant Professor position at the University of Crete in 1985. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1989 and Professor in 1997. He served as Chairman of the Department of Physics from 1999 to 2003, as well as Dean of the School of Sciences from September 2008 to May 2013. During the period 2012-2016 he was a member of the Council of the University of Crete. He retired and was elected Emeritus Professor in 2016.

▸ Andreas Burkert (Germany) — Councillor (since 2018)

Responsibility: European Regional Office of Astronomy for Development; Overseeing of issues on education; Link to Heraeus Foundation

Andreas Burkert holds the chair for computational astrophysics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München since 2003. He got his doctoral degree from the University of Munich (1989) and then went on a Feodor Lynen Fellowship to the University of Illinois, Urbana (1989-1990) and to the University of California, Santa Cruz (1990-1991). In 1991 he joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching as a staff member and in 1995 accepted an offer from the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg to build a new theory group. In 1995 he also received the Habilitation.

▸ Agata Różańska (Poland) — Councillor (Councillor since 2020)

Responsibility: Newsletter Editor; EAS Annual Meeting Board

Agata Różańska is a Professor and Deputy Director at CAMK PAN (N. Copernicus Astronomical Center Polish Academy of Sciences). She works on numerical computations of emission processes in astrophysical X-ray sources and their observations. Her areas of research include simulations of radiative transfer through the warm ionized media, through the hot atmospheres of neutron stars and atmospheres of accretion disks around black holes in AGN and in X-ray binaries. She started the study of multi-phase regions around supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. In 2013-2021 she was a treasurer of the Polish Astronomical Society. Since 2014, she has been the main editor of the conference proceedings series of the Polish Astronomical Society. Up to now 12 volumes have been published. Since 2014, she is a leader of Polish team of scientist and engineers working on the development of subsystems for the ATHENA (Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics) - new generation ESA space mission.

▸ Antoaneta Antonova (Bulgaria) — Councillor (Councillor since 2020)

Responsibility: Liaison with Sustainability and Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Committees; Deputy Newsletter Editor; EAS representative for the selection of A&A awards

Antoaneta Antonova is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Astronomy and National Astronomical Observatory, part of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her master's degree in Physics is from Sofia University, Bulgaria. She did her PhD at Armagh Observatory and Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. From 2008 until 2012 she was an assistant professor at the Department of Astronomy, Sofia University, and an Associate Professor at the same department from 2012 until the end of 2018. She is currently the President of the Bulgarian Astronomical Society and Chair of the National committee for organising the National astronomy Olympiad. Her main research interests are in the field of magnetic activity of cool stars and brown dwarfs and its diagnostics in the optical and radio domains.

▸ Nabila Aghanim (France) — Councillor (Councillor since 2022)

Responsibility: Chair EAS Prize Committee; Oversee nomination of the Lodewijk Woltjer Lecturer; Link to COPUOUS

Nabila Aghanim is a senior researcher of CNRS at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale. She is a leading expert in the field of observational cosmology, more specifically Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies and Large Scale Structure (LSS). Most of her research has taken place in the context of space missions, mainly Planck and Euclid. She played a key role in Planck by leading the working group (WG) on "Clusters and Secondary anisotropies" involving researchers from all over Europe and the US. As WG-lead, she put together the science programme of the collaboration. She has led and significantly contributed to some of the highest-impact Planck papers on the cluster catalogue construction, the cosmological analysis of clusters and the reionisation history. She now co-coordinates the WG on "CMB Cross-correlation". Since 2017, Dr Aghanim is P.I. of an ERC grant on the detection and characterisation of missing baryons. With her team, she has found and studied their signatures in the filaments of the LSS in the SZ, X-rays, and lensing. The expertise of Nabila Aghanim was recognised by the CNRS Bronze medal that she received in 2005 and the Silver medal awarded in 2017.

▸ Jarle Brinchmann (Portugal) — Councillor (Councillor since 2022)

Responsibility: EAS annual meeting, Liaison with Sustainability Advisory Committee

Jarle Brinchmann completed his PhD in astrophysics in 1999 at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University and has MSc and BSc degrees from the University of Oslo. Between 1999 and 2007 he was a post-doc at Oxford University, Max Planck für Astrophysik, and Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Porto (CAUP). He was assistant (2008-2014) and associate (2014-2018) professor at Leiden University, and moved back to CAUP in 2018, where he is currently director of the institute. His research focuses on primarily on galaxies (their evolution and physical make-up), but with some forays into exoplanets and globular clusters. He has a strong involvement in the Euclid satellite where he is the legacy science coordinator, and where he has been co-founder of the diversity committee, edited the newsletter and serve on a number of other committees.

The EAS Council is helped by the EAS Executive Secretary, Dr Marc Audard, who leads the EAS Office.