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Professor Medvedev’s is visiting from the University of Kansas. His research interests cover a wide variety of subjects in high-energy astrophysics and space physics, including: Gamma-ray bursts (the strongest and brightest explosions in the Universe), relativistic shock waves, magnetic field generation, radiation
physics, observational aspects. Astrobiology: how life on Earth has been (and will be) affected by cosmogenic factors, such as gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, energetic solar flares, etc.
Accretion physics: the dynamics of the gas infall onto strongly gravitating objects, signatures of black holes and neutron stars in the accretion spectra. Colsmology: transport phenomena
(e.g. thermal conduction) in galaxy clusters, transport in irregular and chaotic magnetic fields, origin of magnetic fields in the Universe. Solar and stellar wind physics: structure of termination shocks, charge-exchange x-rays from shocks, nonlinear waves in the solar wind. Hosted by the ITC, Mikhail
will be visiting on sabbatical until June 15, 2024.

Biography

Maria J. Rodriguez studied physics in La Plata (Argentina), Santa Barbara (USA) and Barcelona (Spain), and authored works on classical and quantum aspects of black holes. Her research focuses on black hole scattering, energy extraction models, shadows and gravitational perturbations. She held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics – Albert Einstein Institute, Germany; CEA/Saclay, France, and Harvard University, USA. She is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at Utah State University and holds research appointments at Instituto de Física Teórica, Spain and (visiting) at Black Hole Initiative, Harvard.

Biography

Oscar Varela (Utah State University and IFT-Madrid) specializes in theoretical physics at the interface of black hole and high energy physics. He received his PhD from Valencia University, Spain, and completed postdoctoral research at Imperial College, Max Planck, Utrecht and Harvard. His recent work explores holographic aspects of quantum gravity using string and quantum field theory.

Biography

I am a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Research Fellow at BHI. I earned a PhD in Astrophysics at Kyoto University in 2023. I study active galactic nucleus jets and supermassive black holes with numerical simulations. I have been working on theoretical calculations of linear and circular polarization images around a black hole, to shed a new light on the magnetically driving mechanism of the jets.