Our Dusty Universe - Dr. Karin Sandstrom
Most of the heavy elements that make up the Earth and everything on it (including us) once resided in tiny grains of dust in interstellar space. I will describe the fascinating lives of interstellar dust grains from their formation in fiery supernova explosions to their incorporation into planets like Earth. Although dust is an important player in many processes happening in our Galaxy, it is still very mysterious. I will explain how we are working to understand the properties of interstellar dust both in our Galaxy and others using space telescopes like Spitzer, Herschel and, soon, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Dr Karin Sandstrom is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley. Afterwards, she moved to Heidelberg, Germany as a postdoctoral researcher in the Galaxies and Cosmology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). In 2011, she was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Union to continue her postdoctoral work at MPIA. Then she left Germany in 2013 to spend two years as the Bok Postdoctoral Fellow at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.