Tereasa Gail Brainerd (born 1964) is an American astronomer whose interests include galaxy clusters, satellite galaxies, and gravitational lensing. Educated in Canada and the US, she works in the US as a professor of astronomy at Boston University. [1]
Brainerd is the daughter of psychologist Charles Brainerd and audiologist Susan Haske. [2] [3] She was born in St. Johns, Michigan, in 1964, [2] but moved to Edmonton, Alberta with her family as a child. [3] She became an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1987. She went to Ohio State University for graduate study in astronomy, completing her Ph.D. in 1992. Her dissertation, A Study of Properties of Dark Galaxy Halos in a CDM Universe using N-body Simulations, was supervised by Jens Villumsen. [2] [4]
After postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory, she joined the Boston University astronomy department faculty in 1995. She directed the Institute for Astrophysical Research from 2005 to 2011, and chaired the department from 2011 to 2015 and 2016 to 2018. [4] She was promoted to full professor in 2023. [5]
In 2023 the American Astronomical Society (AAS) named Brainerd as a Fellow of the AAS, "for pioneering work in the use of weak gravitational lensing to measure the structure of individual galaxies; significant service to the Society in committee roles and on the Board of Trustees; and leading the Institute for Astrophysical Research and the Department of Astronomy at Boston University to a significant expansion in research in observational astronomy". [6]
In cosmology and physics, cold dark matter (CDM) is a hypothetical type of dark matter. According to the current standard model of cosmology, Lambda-CDM model, approximately 27% of the universe is dark matter and 68% is dark energy, with only a small fraction being the ordinary baryonic matter that composes stars, planets, and living organisms. Cold refers to the fact that the dark matter moves slowly compared to the speed of light, giving it a vanishing equation of state. Dark indicates that it interacts very weakly with ordinary matter and electromagnetic radiation. Proposed candidates for CDM include weakly interacting massive particles, primordial black holes, and axions.
Jeremiah Paul "Jerry" Ostriker is an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and is the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also continues as a senior research scholar. Ostriker has also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University.
Virginia Louise Trimble is an American astronomer specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history of astronomy. She has published more than 600 works in Astrophysics, and dozens of other works in the history of other sciences. She is famous for an annual review of astronomy and astrophysics research that was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and often gives summary reviews at astrophysical conferences. In 2018, she was elected a Patron of the American Astronomical Society, for her many years of intellectual, organizational, and financial contributions to the society.
In modern models of physical cosmology, a dark matter halo is a basic unit of cosmological structure. It is a hypothetical region that has decoupled from cosmic expansion and contains gravitationally bound matter. A single dark matter halo may contain multiple virialized clumps of dark matter bound together by gravity, known as subhalos. Modern cosmological models, such as ΛCDM, propose that dark matter halos and subhalos may contain galaxies. The dark matter halo of a galaxy envelops the galactic disc and extends well beyond the edge of the visible galaxy. Thought to consist of dark matter, halos have not been observed directly. Their existence is inferred through observations of their effects on the motions of stars and gas in galaxies and gravitational lensing. Dark matter halos play a key role in current models of galaxy formation and evolution. Theories that attempt to explain the nature of dark matter halos with varying degrees of success include cold dark matter (CDM), warm dark matter, and massive compact halo objects (MACHOs).
John Peter Huchra was an American astronomer and professor. He was the Vice Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and a Professor of Astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. He was also a former chair of the United States National Committee for the International Astronomical Union. and past president of the American Astronomical Society.
Simon David Manton White, FRS, is a British-German astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019.
Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist and professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly in gravitational lensing and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.
Uroš Seljak is a Slovenian cosmologist and a professor of astronomy and physics at University of California, Berkeley. He is particularly well-known for his research in cosmology and approximate Bayesian statistical methods.
Robert Jay GaBany is an American amateur astronomer and astrophotographer who is also known for his work with an international team of astrophysicists led by Dr. David Martínez-Delgado. GaBany helped pioneer the use of modest size telescopes and off the shelf CCD-cameras to produce long exposure images that revealed ancient galactic merger remnants in the form of star streams surrounding nearby galaxies that were previously undetected or suspected.
Christopher David Impey is a British astronomer, educator, and author. He has been a faculty member at the University of Arizona since 1986. Impey has done research on observational cosmology, in particular low surface brightness galaxies, the intergalactic medium, and surveys of active galaxies and quasars. As an educator, he has pioneered the use of instructional technology for teaching science to undergraduate non-science majors. He has written many technical articles and a series of popular science books including The Living Cosmos, How It Began, How It Ends: From You to the Universe, Dreams of Other Worlds, and Humble Before the Void. He served as Vice-President of the American Astronomical Society, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He serves on the Advisory Council of METI.
Jacqueline Nina Hewitt is an American astrophysicist. She was the first person to discover an Einstein ring. She is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Alice Eve Shapley is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was one of the discoverers of the spiral galaxy BX442. Through her time at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) she has taught Nature of the Universe, Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes, Cosmology: Our Changing Concepts of the Universe, Galaxies, Scientific Writing, AGNs, Galaxies, *and* Writing, and The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and the IGM. Shapley has committed herself to over a two decades of research and publication in the interest of physics and astronomy.
Georges Meylan is a Swiss astronomer, born on July 31, 1950, in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was the director of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and now a professor emeritus of astrophysics and cosmology at EPFL. He is still active in both research and teaching.
Charles Jon Brainerd is an American psychologist and professor in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. He is known for developing fuzzy-trace theory with his wife and colleague, Valerie F. Reyna. He serves as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Developmental Review.
Linda Siobhan Sparke is a British astronomer known for her research on the structure and dynamics of galaxies. She is a professor emerita of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Explorers Program Scientist in the NASA Astrophysics Division.
Barbara Sue Ryden is an American astrophysicist who is a Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University. Her research considers the formation, shape and structure of galaxies. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.
Elizabeth Lyon Blanton is an American astronomer whose research combines observations of galaxy clusters on a broad range of spectra including radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, infrared astronomy, and visible-light astronomy. She is an associate professor of astronomy at Boston University, where she directs the Institute for Astrophysical Research.
Brad Gibson is a retired Australian-Canadian astrophysicist. He is known for identifying the regions of the Galaxy most likely to harbor complex biological life, designing and constructing the first operational liquid mirror telescope observatory, and using supernovae as cosmological probes, the latter for which led to the 2009 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. A passionate advocate for Widening Participation, Gibson delivers more than 100 presentations annually to schools and the general public; his Changing Face of Physics campaign was highlighted as Good Practice by the UK Equality Challenge Unit.
Marc S. Seigar is an astrophysicist, academic and author. He is the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Toledo.
Gary Joseph Ferland is an American astrophysicist. He is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Kentucky. He is best known for developing the astrophysical simulation code Cloudy, for his work on physical processes in ionized plasmas, and investigations of the chemical evolution of the cosmos.