Alumni


 

Théo Hugues

Thesis title: Search for Dark Matter with Liquid Argon Detectors

Supervisor: Marcin Kuźniak, Davide Franco

Year of defence: 2024



Tathagata Saha

Thesis title: Morphology of Circumnuclear Accreting Gas in Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Alex Markowitz

Year of defence: 2024



Paulina Sowicka

Thesis title: Excitation of pulsation in hot pre-white dwarf stars from an observational point of view

Supervisor: Gerald Handler, David Jones

Year of defence: 2024



Mohammad Hassan Naddaf

Thesis title: Simulation of the dynamics and geometry of broad line region in active galactic nuclei

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2023



Saikruba Krishnan

Thesis title: Time-Domain and Spectroscopic studies of Active Galactic Nuclei.

Supervisor: Alex Markowitz

Year of defence: 2023



Agostino Leveque

Thesis title: Extra Galactic Globular Cluster machinery based on MOCCA code for Star Cluster simulations.

Supervisor: Mirosław Giersz

Year of defence: 2023



Aleksandra Olejak

Thesis title: The origin of binary black hole mergers

Supervisor: Tomasz Bulik

Year of defence: 2023



Chandra Shekhar Saraf

(Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), South Korea)

Chandra Shekhar Saraf was born in Sitamarhi, Bihar, India. He obtained his B.Sc. Honors degree in physics from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and M.Sc. degree in physics from the Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly University of Pune). For his masters' thesis, he worked at the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India on the topic of Lyman alpha radiative transfer to study the reionization period in the evolution of the Universe. He was awarded the V. Subramaniam prize by the Indian National Science Academy for his performance during masters degree. He joined CAMK in 2018 to work on testing cosmological models with cross-correlation between Cosmic Microwave Background lensing and galaxy surveys under the supervision of dr hab. Pawel Bielewicz and dr hab. Michal Chodorowski. His studies was an attempt towards resolving the tensions in modern cosmology like the S_8 tension. After the completion of PhD, Chandra Shekhar joined the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) in South Korea for his postdoctoral work.

Thesis title: Studying tomographic cross-correlations between CMB gravitational lensing potential and galaxy surveys

Supervisor: Paweł Bielewicz & Michał Chodorowski

Year of defence: 2023



Lami Suleiman

Thesis title: Dense matter properties and neutron star modelling

Supervisor: Julian Zdunik, Micaela Oertel

Year of defence: 2023



David Abarca

David Abarca grew up in the city of Centralia in Washington State in the USA. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and Astrophysics at Harvard University. It was there that he developed an interest in numerical simulations after writing his senior thesis under the advisement of Prof. Ramesh Narayan and Dr. Aleksander Sądowski (another CAMK alumnus). After graduating, David spent another year at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics continuing to work on research projects with Prof. Narayan and Dr. Sądowski. Through his close collaboration with Dr. Sądowski, he was persuaded to apply to the PhD program at CAMK. He was accepted under the supervision of Prof. Włodek Kluźniak. His main focus during the PhD was adapting the radiative hydrodynamic code, KORAL, to be able to simulate accretion disks around magnetized neutron stars. He also worked on the team who discovered Puffy Disks, involving close collaboration with the radiative astrophysics group at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. Ultimately, he elected not to pursue astronomy as a career, and instead decided to use his technical and analytical skills to transition into finance. He currently works at ING Hubs Poland in market risk management by validating models related to interest rate risk in the banking book.

Thesis title: Numerical simulations of accretion onto neutron stars

Supervisor: Włodzimierz Kluźniak

Year of defence: 2022



Zijia Cui

Thesis title: Disk-Planet Interactions: Formation of Mean-motion Resonances in a Gaseous Protoplanetary Disk

Supervisor: Ewa Szuszkiewicz

Year of defence: 2022



Marta Dziełak

Thesis title: Constraining the geometry of the accretion flow in black hole X-ray binaries

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski, Barbara De Marco

Year of defence: 2022



Lorenzo Gavassino

Thesis title: Thermodynamic methods for relativistic hydrodynamics

Supervisor: Brynmor Haskell

Year of defence: 2022



Filip Morawski

Thesis title: Applications of machine learning methods in gravitational-wave detectors data analysis

Supervisor: Michał Bejger, Elena Cuoco

Year of defence: 2022



José Ortuño-Macías

Thesis title: Kinetic Numerical Simulations of Particle Acceleration Mechanisms in Relativistically Magnetized Jets

Supervisor: Krzysztof Nalewajko

Year of defence: 2022



Katarzyna Rusinek-Abarca

(Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Katarzyna studied astronomy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, obtaining her BSc and MSc degrees for work focused on the radio morphologies of radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Particularly interesting cases of her research were giant radio sources and radio galaxies with recurrent activity. In 2016 she moved to Warsaw where, under the supervision of Prof. Marek Sikora, she investigated the jet production efficiency in AGNs. This task incorporated thousands of galaxies for which a diverse radio dataset was collected, analyzed, and synthesized, resulting in a few well defined samples of galaxies. These studies confirmed the already known yet often questioned in the literature bimodal distribution of radio loudness, and supported the existence of certain threshold(s) condition(s) for the production of the strongest jets. Currently, and since 2020, she has been working as the Research Promoter at the Centre for the History of Renaissance Knowledge at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN where her analytical skills and goal-oriented mind allow her to help build a more robust research environment.

Thesis title: Observational constraints on jet production efficiency in Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Marek Sikora

Year of defence: 2022



Marzena Śniegowska

(Tel Aviv University, Israel)

Marzena Śniegowska was born and grew up in Kruszwica, a small town in central Poland. She obtained his BSc. and  MSc in Astronomy at the Faculty of Physics University of Wasaw. She joined as a PhD student at CAMK in 2018. During her PhD studies she worked with Prof. Michał Chodorowski of CAMK PAN and Prof. Bożena Czerny of CFT (Center for Theoretical Physics) PAN on time-dependent phenomena in active galactic nuclei, mostly radiation pressure driven thermal and viscous instabilities. Currently, Marzena is working as a postdoc in Tel Aviv University.

Thesis title: Variability and evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny, Michał Chodorowski

Year of defence: 2022



Ankan Sur

(Princeton University, USA)

Ankan Sur was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He obtained his BSc degree in physics from the St. Xavier's College of the University of Calcutta, and an MSc degree in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, where he was an Amsterdam Excellence Scholar. During his masters' thesis, he worked as part of the LIGO Virgo Collaboration on the statistical measurement of the Hubble constant. He joined CAMK to work on neutron star magnetic fields and on gravitational-wave mountains under the supervision of Dr. Brynmor Haskell. He was awarded the President's Scholarship of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2021, and was also a predoc at the Flatiron Institute in New York. Following his completion of PhD, Ankan joined Princeton University in the US for his postdoctoral work.

Thesis title: Magnetic fields in isolated neutron stars: from the interior to the exterior

Supervisor: Brynmor Haskell

Year of defence: 2022



Piotr Wielgórski

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Cefeidy klasyczne i II typu jako kosmiczne wskaźniki odległości

Supervisor: Grzegorz Pietrzyński

Year of defence: 2022



Bartłomiej Zgirski

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Selected Methods of Precision Distance Determinations to Nearby Galaxies

Supervisor: Grzegorz Pietrzyński

Year of defence: 2022



Maitrayee Gupta

(Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology, France)

Maitrayee Gupta received her master’s of science in Cosmology from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. As part of that research, she studied the clustering properties of galaxies and the correlation between galaxy types and their mass, colour, and UV properties. She then joined the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre to pursue a Ph.D. under Dr. Marek Sikora. The main objective of her thesis was to study differences between radiative properties of the accretion flows in Radio Loud (RL) and Radio Quiet (RQ) AGN and their relation to jet production efficiency, for which she received the Preludium Grant. She also received the NAWA Iwanovska Grant to research the variability of RL quasars at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in MA, USA and a fellowship from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to continue her research there with Dr. Aneta Siemiginowska after defending her thesis. She most recently moved to Toulouse, France where she is affiliated with the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) under CNRS, and CNES. There, she works as a postdoc developing EXODUS, a software tool for detecting faint rapid transients in XMM-Newton data that may not have been detected automatically using the XMM-Newton pipeline. While in France, she has also studied variability properties and black-hole masses of low-luminosity AGN. Her research interests include high-energy astrophysics, active galactic nuclei (AGN) and their host galaxies, and X-ray astronomy.

Thesis title: Comparison of AGN properties in luminous radio galaxies to their radio-quiet counterparts

Supervisor: Marek Sikora

Year of defence: 2021



Vadym Khomenko

Thesis title: Superfluid Neutron Star Dynamics

Supervisor: Brynmor Haskell

Year of defence: 2021



Samaresh Mondal

(Brera Astronomical Observatory, INAF, Merate, Italy)

Thesis title: Probing the nature of super-Eddington accretion in ultraluminous X-ray sources

Supervisor: Agata Różańska

Year of defence: 2021



Henryka Netzel

(Konkoly Observatory, Hungary)

Thesis title: Badanie gwiazd klasycznego pasa niestabilności metodami asterosejsmologii

Supervisor: Radosław Smolec

Year of defence: 2021



Ananda Deepika Bollimpalli

Thesis title: Temporal Variability Processes in Discs and Shells around Compact Objects

Supervisor: Włodzimierz Kluźniak

Year of defence: 2020



Krystian Iłkiewicz

Thesis title: Badanie populacji akreujących białych karłów

Supervisor: Joanna Mikołajewska

Year of defence: 2020



Magdalena Sieniawska

Thesis title: Rotating neutron stars: dense -matter interiors and gravitational-wave searches using time-domain F-statiscic methods

Supervisor: Michał Bejger

Year of defence: 2020



Marcin Semczuk

Thesis title: Tidally induced morphology of late type galaxies

Supervisor: Ewa Łokas

Year of defence: 2019



Piotr Sybilski

Thesis title: Detection of non-keplerian effects in eclipsing binary stars: from simulations to Solaris, a global network of robotic telescopes

Supervisor: Maciej Konacki

Year of defence: 2019



Abbas Askar

(Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden)

Abbas Askar was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, where he completed his primary and secondary education. Following the completion of his schooling in 2006, he was awarded a scholarship to attend University College Utrecht (UCU), the international honours college of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Abbas graduated from UCU in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science (in physical sciences: astrophysics, mathematics and physics) and a Bachelor of Arts (in humanities: philosophy, religious studies and history) degree. In spring 2010, he spent a semester studying philosophy in a masters programme at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 2010, he was selected and awarded a scholarship for the inaugural edition of the Astromundus (Erasmus Mundus) Joint Masters Degree programme in Astronomy and Astrophysics which was offered by a consortium of 5 European universities. During this programme, Abbas studied at the universities of Innsbruck (Austria), Padova (Italy) and Belgrade (Serbia). Towards the end of 2013, he joined the CAMK PhD program to work under the supervision of Prof. Mirek Giersz. For his PhD research, he used computer simulations to investigate the evolution of black hole populations within dense and massive star clusters. He is a part of the MOCCA code development team led by Prof. Giersz at CAMK. Following the completion of his PhD degree in 2018, Abbas joined Lund University in Sweden on a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Carl Trygger Foundation for Scientific Research. As of 2023, he is employed as a researcher in Astrophysics at Lund University. His research interests include understanding the formation, retention and growth of black holes within dense star clusters; the formation of gravitational wave sources and compact object binaries; and the co-evolution of nuclear star clusters and supermassive black holes.

Thesis title: Investigation of Black Hole Populations in Dense Stellar Systems using MOCCA code for Star Cluster Simulations

Supervisor: Mirosław Giersz

Year of defence: 2018



Diogo Teixeira Belloni

Thesis title: On cataclysmic variable properties in evolving star clusters based on MOCCA Dynamical Simulations

Supervisor: Mirosław Giersz

Year of defence: 2018



Grzegorz Gajda

(Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestial Physics, Garching)

Thesis title: Tidally induces bars in dwarf galaxies

Supervisor: Ewa Łokas, Evangelie Athanassoula

Year of defence: 2018



Klaudia Kowalczyk

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Modelling the mass distribution and orbital structure of dwarf spheroidal galaxies with Schwarzschild orbit superposition method

Supervisor: Ewa Łokas

Year of defence: 2018



Tek Prasad Adhikari

(Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India)

Tek Prasad Adhikari was born and grew up in Ilam, a small hilly region of Eastern Nepal. He obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from Mechi Multiple Campus of Tribhuvan University located at Bhadrapur, Nepal. He completed his M. Sc. in theoretical physics at the Central Department of Physics, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, and later joined as a PhD student at CAMK in 2013. During his PhD studies he worked with Prof. Agata Rozanska on various aspects of emission and absorption properties of Active Galactic Nuclei environment. Later in 2018, he received his PhD degree and he is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, India. His current research interest is mainly focussed on building a synergy between the photoionization models and X-ray/optical observations of absorption and emission clouds present in the AGN systems. Apart from the research activities, Tek is interested in communicating science among the public and school students by writing popular articles and giving popular talks at the schools of remote areas of Nepal.

Thesis title: Photoionization modelling as a density diagnostic of line emitting/absorbing regions in Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Agata Różańska

Year of defence: 2018



Stanisław Kozłowski

Thesis title: Photometry and Spectroscopy of Selected Eclipsing Binaries with the Solaris Robotic Telescopes

Supervisor: Maciej Konacki

Year of defence: 2017



Bhupendra Prakash Mishra

(Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, USA)

Bhupendra Mishra grew up in a small town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. He obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Ewing Christian College, Allahabad, India. He did his M.Sc. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2012. Soon after M.Sc. he joined as a first foreign national PhD student of CAMK in 2012. He worked with Prof. Kluzniak and completed his PhD in 2017 on some of the first global 3D GRMHD models of thin accretion disks. He joined his first postdoc with Prof. Mitch Begelman at University of Colorado Boulder USA in 2017 and further studied strongly magnetized accretion disk models. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, USA and  working on MHD-PIC models and also global GRMHD models of AGN accretion disks.


Thesis title: General relativistic simulations of luminous and non-steady accretion flows

Supervisor: Włodzimierz Kluźniak

Year of defence: 2017



Weronika Narloch

(Departamento de Astronomia, Universidad de Concepción, Chile)

Thesis title: Astrometry of selected globular clusters

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2017



Varadarajan Parthasarathy

Thesis title: MHD simulations of time varying astrophysical flows

Supervisor: Włodzimierz Kluźniak

Year of defence: 2017



Karolina Bąkowska

(Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)

Thesis title: Comprehensive analysis of HT Cassiopeiae photometry - a Rosetta stone of dwarf novae

Supervisor: Arkadiusz Olech

Year of defence: 2016



Milena Ratajczak

(University of Warsaw)

Milena was born and grew up in Poznań, where she graduated from Adam Mickiewicz University. She received her PhD degree from CAMK PAN in Toruń under the supervision of prof. Maciej Konacki. During her PhD studies she was actively involved in the Solaris project by setting up a network of robotic telescopes in the southern hemisphere. As a post-doc at the University of Wrocław, Milena started the collaboration with the BRITE consortium, which uses a constellation of nano-satellites to observe the brightest stars in our Galaxy.

Milena works at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw as a member of the OGLE group - a large-scale photometric sky survey. Her scientific interests include variable stars, especially binary systems, as well as pulsating stars.

Apart from scientific interests, Milena is actively involved in many outreach activities. She communicates science via public talks, visiting schools, writing popular-science articles, reviewing books, and designing space-related games. She is also a Polish node representative of several international sci-comm projects and the Executive Secretary of the Polish Astronomical Society.

Milena was born and grew up in Poznań, where she graduated from Adam Mickiewicz University. She received her PhD degree from CAMK PAN in Toruń under the supervision of prof. Maciej Konacki. During her PhD studies she was actively involved in the Solaris project by setting up a network of robotic telescopes in the southern hemisphere. As a post-doc at the University of Wrocław, Milena started the collaboration with the BRITE consortium, which uses a constellation of nano-satellites to observe the brightest stars in our Galaxy.
Milena works at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw as a member of the OGLE group - a large-scale photometric sky survey. Her scientific interests include variable stars, especially binary systems, as well as pulsating stars.
Apart from scientific interests, Milena is actively involved in many outreach activities. She communicates science via public talks, visiting schools, writing popular-science articles, reviewing books, and designing space-related games. She is also a Polish node representative of several international sci-comm projects and the Executive Secretary of the Polish Astronomical Society.

Thesis title: Precise determination of giant's parameters in eclipsing binary systems

Supervisor: Maciej Konacki

Year of defence: 2015



Arkadiusz Hypki

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

 

Arek studied astronomy at the Adam Mickiewicz University, and wrote his master's thesis at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. He received his PhD at NCAC in 2014 with a thesis on blue stragglers in globular star clusters. Since then, star clusters have become his main scientific interest. He is one of the developers of the MOCCA code that can be used to perform detailed numerical simulations of star clusters of any size. In addition, he is interested in distributed data analysis. He develops BEANS software, which he uses on a daily basis to analyze hundreds of terabytes of MOCCA data. Arek worked as a postdoc in Leiden and in Poznań, he collaborated with other scientists in the USA, UK, China and Germany, and now is back at the NCAC in Warsaw.

Thesis title: Properties of blue straggler populations in evolving star clusters based on the MOCCA dynamical simulations

Supervisor: Mirosław Giersz

Year of defence: 2014



Magdalena Otulakowska-Hypka

(Astronomical Observatory Institute, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland)

 

 

Magdalena Otulakowska-Hypka completed her master's studies at the A. Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań and doctoral studies at N. Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw on the topic of dwarf novae. She spent some time on research collaboration in the field of close binary stars in several foreign astronomical institutes: in Bonn, Nice, NYC, Leiden, and Garching. In the meantime, she's had two wonderful children and is now working hard to combine family life with science. She works at AMU, and her main scientific interests are now symbiotic stars and novae.

Thesis title: Study of outbursts properties of dwarf novae

Supervisor: Arkadiusz Olech

Year of defence: 2014



Anna Barnacka

Thesis title: Detection Techniques for the H.E.S.S. II Telescope, Data Modeling of Gravitational Lensing and Emission of Blazars in HE-VHE Astronomy

Supervisor: Rafał Moderski, Jean Francois Glicenstein

Year of defence: 2013



Krzysztof Hryniewicz

(National Center for Nuclear Research, Poland)

Thesis title: Weak Emission Line Quasars

Supervisor: Bożna Czerny

Year of defence: 2013



Tomash Zdravkov

Thesis title: Hybrid Oscillations of a Main Sequence B Type Stars

Supervisor: Aleksiej Pamiatnych

Year of defence: 2013



Maciej Bilicki

(Center for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

Maciej was born and grew up in Łódź (Lodz) right in the middle of Poland. Since childhood he was interested in astronomy and mathematics, and after finishing high school he decided to study mathematics with computer science at the University of Łódź. However, before (successfully) completing his MSc program there, he knew that he'd prefer to be an astronomer and not a mathematician or a computer scientist. He therefore took up yet another 5 years of MSc studies, this time in astronomy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (of which 1 year spent at the Warsaw University within the MOST program). Following successful summer internships at NCAC Warsaw under Prof. Michał Chodorowski's guidance, Maciej first wrote his MSc thesis in theoretical cosmology (2007) and then took up PhD studies at Bartycka 18 under Prof. Chodorowski's supervision. Maciej's PhD thesis defended in 2012 dealt with "Motion of the Local Group as a cosmological probe".
Over 2012-15 Maciej was a SARChI postdoctoral fellow at the Astronomy Department of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, working on observational cosmology and galaxy catalogs. Over that period he gained particular interest in applications of modern computer techniques, such as machine learning, to astronomy, and he's been working on these ever since. In 2015 Maciej moved to the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, staying there until early 2019 as a senior postdoctoral researcher, and extending his interests to other aspects of cosmology, including gravitational lensing. During that time he also kept his links with Poland and in particular over 2017-18 was a part-time assistant professor at the Astrophysics Division of the National Center for Nuclear Research in Warsaw.
In 2019 Maciej joined the Center for Theoretical Physics PAS in Warsaw, first as an assistant professor, and since 2021 as an associate professor. He is co-leading the Computational Cosmology Group there and continues working on observational cosmology, wide-angle galaxy catalogs and applications of computer science techniques to extragalactic astrophysics. He's an active member of several photometric and spectroscopic galaxy surveys, spanning from the optical to the radio domain.

Thesis title: Motion of the Local Group as a Cosmological Probe

Supervisor: Michał Chodorowski

Year of defence: 2012



Kamil Deresz

Thesis title: Analysis of stellar propoer motions in the fields of neary globular clusters

Supervisor: Janusz Kałużny

Year of defence: 2012



Morgane Fortin

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Evolution & Dynamics of Neutron Stars: from Microphysics to Astrophysics

Supervisor: Leszek Zdunik

Year of defence: 2012



Edyta Podlewska-Gaca

Thesis title: O rezonansach ruchu średniego we wczesnych etapach ewolucji układów planetarnych

Supervisor: Ewa Szuszkiewicz

Year of defence: 2012



Anna Zajczyk

(University of Maryland, Baltimore County & NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA)

Thesis title: Studies of the Influence of Magnetospheric Pulsar Winds on the Pulsar Surroundings

Supervisor: Bronisław Rudak, Alain Falvard, Yves Gallant

Year of defence: 2012



Jarosław Klimentowski

Thesis title: Tidal Evolution of Dwarf Galaxies in the Local Group

Supervisor: Ewa Łokas

Year of defence: 2011



Krzysztof Nalewajko

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Krzysztof Nalewajko grew up in Ostróda, at high school he was a winner of the national astronomical olympiad. He studied astronomy at the University of Warsaw and went on to CAMK for Ph.D. studies, working on the topics of dissipation in relativistic jets of active galaxies and non-thermal emission of blazars under the supervision of Prof. Marek Sikora. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2011 and went on for postdoctoral positions in the USA. He spent 3 years at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with Profs. Mitchell Begelman and Dmitri Uzdensky on relativistic magnetic reconnection and kinetic plasma simulations. In 2013 he was awarded the NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. He then spent 1 year at the Stanford University, working with Profs. Roger Blandford and Grzegorz Madejski. In 2015 he returned to CAMK for a tenure-track position, obtained habilitation in 2017 and became a tenured institute professor in 2018. He continues working on kinetic simulations of relativistic magnetic reconnection, utilizing the largest Polish supercomputers. Official website: https://users.camk.edu.pl/knalew/

Thesis title: Reconfinement Shocks in Jets of Active Galaxies

Supervisor: Marek Sikora

Year of defence: 2011



Aleksander Sądowski

 

 

Aleksander Sądowski studied accretion flows on black holes through numerical simulations. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an Einstein Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed KORAL - one of the most sophisticated, at that time at least, numerical codes for performing radiative simulations of magnetohydrodynamical flows in strong gravitational fields. Currently, he is a senior quantitative researcher at Akuna Capital where he optimizes algorithms trading in financial markets.

Thesis title: Slim Accretion Disks Around Black Holes

Supervisor: Marek Abramowicz

Year of defence: 2011



Odele Straub

Thesis title: Astrophysical Estimation of the Black Hole Spin

Supervisor: Marek Abramowicz

Year of defence: 2011



Mariusz Gromadzki

(Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw)

Mariusz was born and grew up in Łomża. He received his master's degree in astronomy from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń based on the work dedicated to study fast variability of symbiotic stars. He was continuing symbiotic stars research during PhD study at Nicolaus Astronomical Center in Warsaw but explored variability timescales increased from minutes and hours to years, decades and even centuries. After graduation, he shortly worked at the Space Research Centre in Warsaw and then move to Chile. During almost five years at Universidad de Valparaíso, he joined the VVV survey science team, his tasks were related to  searching high proper motion low mass stars and brown dwarfs towards extremely crowded Milky Way fields. He also followed up candidates for the coolest and the oldest brown dwarfs in the Galaxy using near-IR facilities installed on the largest telescopes in the Earth. 
Currently he is working at the Astronomical Observatory of University of Warsaw. His main scientific interests are connected with spectroscopic studies of various types of astrophysical transients, including supernovae, optical counterpart of gravitational wave source, tidal disruption events and other super massive black hole related transients. He is a member of the OGLE team, ePESSTO+ and ENGRAVE collaborations. He is probably the most active polish user of the South African Large Telescope thanks to participation
in  the large program entitled "Observing the Transient Universe".

Thesis title: Physical Parameter of Symbiotic Stars

Supervisor: Joanna Mikołajewska

Year of defence: 2010



Wojciech Hellwing

(Center for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

Thesis title: Cosmology of the Scalar-interacting Dark Matter

Supervisor: Roman Juszkiewicz

Year of defence: 2010



Krzysztof Hełminiak

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Krzysztof was born in Barlinek. He obtained his master's degree in astronomy from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń based on the work on astrometry of visual binaries with adaptive optics. In 2006 he started PhD studies at the NCAC Toruń, working on low-mass stars in binaries, under the supervision of Prof. Maciej Konacki. He obtained his PhD in October 2010, and immediately started his post-doc position at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile. He extended his work on eclipsing binaries to other types of stars, and established the Comprehensive Research with Echelles on the Most interesting Eclipsing binaries (CREME) project, aimed at looking for and characterizing rare, unusual, and otherwise valuable stellar pairs. This work has been continued during his second post-doctoral term, at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. In 2016 Krzysztof came back to where he started - Toruń - to continue his work at the NCAC branch.

He is broadly interested in eclipsing binaries, their observations and modelling, as well as looking for planets around them. During his time in Chile and Hawaii, Krzysztof was also working in several large international collaborations, like the Vista Variables in Via Lactea (VVV), Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru (SEEDS) or the Hyper-Supreme Cam (HSC) consortium, as well as helped in several other projects (e.g. HAT-South, Kepler). He is also involved in the Solaris project, namely in the search for circumbinary bodies with eclipse timing variations. He continues his work on precise characterization of eclipsing binaries, focusing on the satellite-borne observations with TESS and (future) PLATO missions. He is also one of the most active Polish astronomers in terms of proposals submitted to ESO.

His favorite aspect of the astronomer's job are the travels. Apart from Chile and Hawaii, his work duties (observations, conferences, scientific collaborations) took him for example to Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, or Japan.

Thesis title: Derivation of Fundamental Parameters of Late-Type Stars in Binaries with Precise Photometry, High-Resolution Spectroscopy, Imaging with Adaptive Optics and Optical Inteferometry

Supervisor: Maciej Konacki

Year of defence: 2010



Tomasz Kamiński

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Thesis title: Observations of Molecular Material in the Echo of V838 Monocerotis in Rotational Transitions of CO. The Nature of the Echo Material and Photo-Processing of Dust in the Light Echo

Supervisor: Romuald Tylenda

Year of defence: 2010



Szymon Starczewski

Thesis title: Selected Aspects of Gravitational Interaction Between a Protoplanetary Disk and a Protoplanet

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2010



Radosław Wojtak

(Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark)

Radek Wojtak studied astronomy at the Jagiellonian University. His PhD research undertaken in the NCAC was focused on developing new dynamical models of galaxy clusters for the purpose of constraining dark matter content in these objects. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2010 and then he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Niels Bohr Institute (DARK excellence centre) at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University. In 2017 he returned to the Niels Bohr Institute, where he is currently an associate professor. His current scientific interests include topics such as dark matter and dark energy, cosmological simulations, gravitationally lensed supernovae and observational tests of cosmological models. He is a member of the Young Supernova Experiment transient survey, where he leads a group searching for gravitationally lensed supernovae. He is also co-coordinating establishing a data centre of the Rubin Observatory (LSST) in Denmark.

Thesis title: Mass Distribution and Galaxy Orbits in Nearby Galaxy Clusters

Supervisor: Ewa Łokas

Year of defence: 2010



Artur Rutkowski

Thesis title: Observational Properties of SU UMa Type Dwarf Novae

Supervisor: Arkadiusz Olech

Year of defence: 2009



Radosław Smolec

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Radoslaw Smolec was born and grew up in Grudziądz. His interest in astronomy developed thanks to attending local astronomy club led by Małgorzata Śróbka-Kubiak in Grudziądz Planetarium and Astronomical Observatory. At the end of secondary school, he was introduced to the world of pulsating stars by prof. Wojciech Dziembowski, while travelling back home from astronomical Olympiad in Chorzow.

Master thesis, "Metallicity dependence of the Blazhko effect", was defended in 2004 under the supervision of prof. Paweł Moskalik, a faculty member at CAMK PAN. After that, Radoslaw continued his research via PhD program at CAMK PAN, supervised by prof. Moskalik. As part of his PhD research he developed nonlinear convective pulsation codes, recently implemented in the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) as Radial Stellar Pulsation (RSP) tool. Investigation of pulsation-convection coupling continued also during the post-doctoral research conducted in Astronomical Institute of the University of Vienna (2009-2011). Since 2012 he is back at the Copernicus Center leading various projects related to classical pulsators. Fields of expertise include stellar pulsation and stellar evolution theories, non-linear modelling of radial stellar pulsations and time-frequency analysis of photometric time series. Habilitation degree received in 2016.

Today Radoslaw Smolec is leading his own research group addressing various problems of stellar evolution and stellar pulsation theories. He is a member of the Araucaria Team and developer of the MESA.

Thesis title: Nonlinear modelling of radial stellar pulsation

Supervisor: Paweł Moskalik

Year of defence: 2009



Grzegorz Stachowski

(Institute of Physics, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland)

Thesis title: Eclipsing Binaries as Indicators of Age and Distance

Supervisor: Janusz Kałużny

Year of defence: 2009



Monika Mościbrodzka

(Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University, the Netherlands)

 

 

Monika Moscibrodzka received her Master's degree in 2004 at the University of Warsaw. In 2008 she completed PhD studies in our Institute under the supervision of prof. Bożena Czerny. In the following years she held post-doctoral positions in University of Illinois and University of Nevada. Now she is an Assistant Professor in Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her field of research is relativistic astrophysics. She is a core member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Thesis title: The Dynamics and Radiation Spectra of Low Angular Momentum Accretion Flow onto a Black Hole

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2008



Krzysztof Bolejko

(University of Tasmania)

Krzysztof Bolejko studied at our Institute between 2004 and 2007. During this time he investigated inhomogeneous cosmological models under the supervision of prof. Andrzej Krasiński. The results he obtained laid foundations for the book "Structures in the Universe by Exact Methods: Formation, Evolution, Interactions", which was published by the Cambridge University Press.

After his PhD he held several prestigious post-doctoral fellowships, in Australia, United States, South Africa and Europe. These include Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation Fellowship at University of Melbourne, Fulbright Fellowship at Steward Observatory or Marie Curie Fellowship at University of Oxford. In 2017 he obtained habilitation from the Jagiellonian University. Since 2018 he has been a Fellow of the Astronomical Society of Australia, and since 2019 a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

He is now a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Tasmania. His field of expertise is theoretical cosmology, and his research focuses on general relativity and investigation of the nature of gravity.

Contact: krzysztof.bolejko@utas.edu.au

Thesis title: Application of Inhomogeneous Solutions of the General Relativity to Cosmology

Supervisor: Andrzej Krasiński

Year of defence: 2007



Paweł Lachowicz

Thesis title: Selected Aspects of Periodic and Quasi-Periodic Variability of Accreting Black Holes

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2007



Paweł Pietrukowicz

(Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw)

Paweł Pietrukowicz was born in Gorzów Wielkopolski in 1978. In 1997 he moved to the Polish capital to start his astronomical career at the University of Warsaw (MSc, 2002) and to continue at Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (PhD, 2007). His research interests focus on structure and evolution of the Milky Way, properties of stellar clusters and variable stars, mainly pulsating stars. He earned a lot of observational experience during his postdoctoral position at Catolica University in Santiago de Chile in years 2007-2009. Since 2010 Paweł Pietrukowicz works as Assistant Professor at Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw. He is an active member of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) team. His most important achievements include the discovery of a new, unexpected class of pulsating stars named Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators (2017), discovery of thousands of variable stars of various types in the Galactic disk (2013), and detection of the first, very rare phenomenon of the gravitational microlensing in a globular cluster (2005).

Thesis title: Searches for Dwarf Novae in Globular Clusters Based on CASE Data

Supervisor: Janusz Kałużny

Year of defence: 2007



Anna Szostek

Thesis title: Modelling and Data Analysis of the High-mass X-ray Binaries Cyg X-1 and Cyg X-3

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 2007



Natasza Siódmiak

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Thesis title: Observational Aspects of Oxygen and Carbon Stars Evolution in Post-AGB Phase

Supervisor: Ryszard Szczerba

Year of defence: 2006



Agnieszka Słowikowska

(Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)

Thesis title: Pulsar Characteristic Across The Energy Spectrum

Supervisor: Bronisław Rudak

Year of defence: 2006



Małgorzata Sobolewska

(Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, USA)

Małgorzata Sobolewska is an X-ray astronomer working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the High Energy Astrophysics Division. She works on understanding high energy phenomena associated with the accretion onto compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. To do this, she uses X-ray telescopes aboard various satellites in order to record radiation emitted by quasars and X-ray binaries, and she builds theoretical models to explain the properties of this radiation. She is also a member of the Operations and Science Support Division in the Chandra X-ray Center, where her main activities include monitoring and trending analysis of the subsystems of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy.

Thesis title: Spectral and Timing Methods of Studying Geometry of Accretion onto Compact Objects

Supervisor: Piotr Życki

Year of defence: 2006



Michał Bejger

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Michał Bejger's research interests revolve around the gravitational-wave astronomy: its data analysis methods (and, in general, methods of analyzing any difficult, noisy data) and modeling of various astrophysical compact objects using numerical general relativity, and the physics of extremely dense matter in the interiors of neutron stars. This often requires a lot of coding, the use of high-performance computing (with hardware accelerators like the Graphical Processing Units) and applications of novel types of machine learning algorithms. In the past, he was a Marie Curie fellow and a visiting astronomer at the Paris Observatory, as well as research scientist in the Steinbuch Centre for Computing in Karlsruhe, Germany the Wigner center in Budapest, Hungary, and the Paris AstroParticule et Cosmologie gravitational-waves group (APC). He has been a member of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration since 2011, and a work group leader of the COST action G2Net since 2018. He is also actively involved in the popularization of science, being an editor of the astronomy section of the science magazine ''Delta'' since 2011.

Thesis title: Neutron Star Dynamics and the Dense Matter Equation of State

Supervisor: Paweł Haensel

Year of defence: 2005



Artur Gawryszczak

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: AMR Models of Protoplanetary Discs

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2005



Rafał Nowakowski

Thesis title: Nonlinear Couplings in Multimode Stellar Pulsations

Supervisor: Wojciech Dziembowski

Year of defence: 2005



Adam Frankowski

Thesis title: Late Stages of Stellar Evolution in Binary Systems

Supervisor: Romuald Tylenda

Year of defence: 2004



Agnieszka Majczyna

(National Center for Nuclear Research, Poland)

Thesis title: Mass and Radius Determination of X-ray Bursts Source MXB 1728-34

Supervisor: Jerzy Madej

Year of defence: 2004



Marek Nikołajuk

(University of Bialystok, Faculty of Physics, Poland)

Thesis title: Global Parameters of Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2004



Paweł Ciecieląg

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Wyznaczanie kosmologicznego parametru Beta przy użyciu prędkości i przyśpieszenia Grupy Lokalnej

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2003



Jarosław Dyks

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Thesis title: Radiative Processes in the Magnetospheres of Isolated Neutron Stars

Supervisor: Bronisław Rudak

Year of defence: 2003



Agnieszka Janiuk

(Center for Theoretical Physics of PAS)

Agnieszka Janiuk was born and grew up in Warsaw. She studied astronomy at the Physics Department of the Warsaw University, where she received her Master of Science degree in 1998. She learned there about the physics of accretion, and active alactic nuclei, thanks to the course given by dr Andrzej Kurpiewski. The MSc thesis was prepared however under the supervision of prof. Bozena Czerny, who was a faculty member at the N. Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences. After that, Agnieszka Janiuk continued her research via PhD program at NCAC, and she worked with prof. Czerny on the accretion pocesses in AGN and Galactic black hole X-ray binaries (XRBs). As a part of that PhD, she developed a new numerical code for simulating the global structure and time evolution of an unstable accretion disk, which is subject to radiation pressure driven theramal and viscous instabilities. The code is now publicly available under the name GLADIS and serves mainly for pedagogical purposes.

The postdoctoral projects of Agnieszka, started in 2003 at Max Planck Institute for astrophysics in Garching, and then continued with prof. Daniel Proga at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and finally during the tenure-tarck contract at CAMK, were devoted mostly to the cosmic explosions named gamma ray bursts. These phenomena share some physical properties of the formerly mentioned black hole systems, but they are much more violent in nature. They are launching ultrarelativistic jets on the cost of black hole rotation and accretion mediated by the strong magnetic fields. In addition, nuclear reactions that occur in the very hot and dense plasmas of their accretion disks, lead to copious emission of neutrinos. Finally, as we know now from gravitational wave observations and their electromagnetic counterparts, many GRBs originate from binary neutron star mergers, whose ejecta are the nucleosynthesis sites for the heavies elements in the Universe.

From 2010, Agnieszka Janiuk works as a faculty member at the Center for Theoretical Physics of PAS. Since then, she leads her own research group, and has already supervised a number of post-docs, PhD projects and Master students. In 2021, she was awarded the full professorship in natural sciences by the President of Poland.

Official website: http://old.cft.edu.pl/astrofizyka/?page_id=98

Thesis title: Disk Accretion onto a Black Hole

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2003



Kacper Kornet

Thesis title: A Simple Model of the Evolution of Solids in Protoplanetary Disk

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2003



Waldemar Ogłoza

(Institute of Physics, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland)

Thesis title: Spektroskopia i fotometria wybranych układów prekataklizmicznych

Supervisor: Marek Sarna

Year of defence: 2003



Michał Błażejowski

Thesis title: Modeling the Gamma-Rays Flares in Blazar Jets

Supervisor: Marek Sikora

Year of defence: 2002



Barbara Mochejska

Thesis title: Photometry and Analysis of Cepheids in the M31 and M33 Galaxies

Supervisor: Janusz Kałużny

Year of defence: 2002



Weronika Śliwa

Thesis title: Analysis of the X-ray Background Radiation

Supervisor: Andrzej Sołtan

Year of defence: 2002



Grzegorz Wardziński

Thesis title: Radiative Processes in Accreting Black Holes

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 2002



Krzysztof Belczyński

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Population Synthesis in Modern Astrophysical Applications

Supervisor: Tomasz Bulik

Year of defence: 2001



Marek Gierliński

Thesis title: Spectral States of Galactic Black Hole Binaries

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 2000



Andrzej Kudlicki

Thesis title: Statistical Properties of the Cosmic Velocity Fields - Numerical Simulations

Supervisor: Michał Różyczka

Year of defence: 2000



Agnieszka Pollo

(National Center for Nuclear Research, Poland)

Thesis title: Testing the Gravitational Instability Theory with 2-D Galaxy Surveys

Supervisor: Roman Juszkiewicz

Year of defence: 2000



Agata Różańska

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Agata Różańska grew up in Bydgoszcz, town in northern Poland. Her master's degree in astronomy, she completed at the Faculty of Physics University of Wasaw. PhD in astrophysics titled: Coexistence of the cold and the hot plasma in the vicinity of the black hole she defended in the year 2000 under the supervision of prof. Bożena Czerny. She obtained the habilitation degree for the work titled: The effects of X-ray reprocessing in Active Galactic Nuclei, in 2009. In the year 2020 she received the title of professor. Currently, she works at Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. 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 active galactic nuclei and in X-ray. She started the study of multi-phase regions around supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. Agata 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 space mission, with a launch foreseen in 2032. She is a member of Polish Astronomical Society, International Astronomical Union and European Astronomical Society. Since 2013, Agata is the Treasurer of the Polish Astronomical Society. In 2019 she was appointed a member of Space and Satellite Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences for the 2019–2022 term. She was elected a Council member of the European Astronomical Society for the 2020–2024 term. Agata is an author of public outreach articles, lectures and popular science movies.

Thesis title: Coexistence of the cold and the hot plasma in the vicinity of the black hole

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 2000



Ireneusz Włodarczyk


Ireneusz Włodarczyk was born on May 7, 1950, in Kalisz. He observed sunspots there and had sent the results to prof. Jan Mergentaler. After graduating from the Technical Secondary School of Economics there in 1969, he started studying astronomy, specializing in heliophysics, at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry of the University of Wrocław. He finished it in 1974, defending his MA thesis under the supervision of doc. Bogdan Rompolt. For 37 years, he had worked in the Silesian Planetarium, from 1975, as the head of the local astronomical observatory. Since 1977 he has been observing asteroids and comets and has been studying their dynamics. He started the observations based on the substantive help of Assoc. Maciej Bielicki from the University of Warsaw. On June 11, 1998, he published in Brian Marsden's Minor Planet Center the first Polish astrometric position of the asteroid obtained using a modern SBIG-ST8 CCD camera (MPC 31 870) and on October 8, 1998, the first Polish astrometric comet position (MPC 32 565). Until 2000, he had published nearly 1,000 astrometric observations of asteroids and comets in the MPC. The observations were made by several employees of the Silesian Planetarium.

From 1983, he collaborated with prof. dr hab. Grzegorz Sitarski from the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The cooperation consisted in testing own observations made in Chorzów and presenting the results of their calculations and own computer programs describing the movements of asteroids and comets. He deals with the observations and dynamics of Near-earth Asteroids and comets, including those discovered at the Moletai astronomical observatories in Lithuania, Baldone in Latvia and VATT in the USA, cooperating with these centres. He also deals with potential asteroid collisions with the Earth, including the dangerous asteroid Apophis until March 2021. He is also studying the evolution of asteroid families. In addition, he deals with the dynamics of Mars crossers as well as asteroids and comets in retrograde orbits.

In 2011, together with astronomy enthusiasts in Rozdrazew, a commune in Greater Poland, they established the 19th branch of the Polish Society of Amateur Astronomers. From the beginning until now, 2021, he is its president. He is a member of Divisions A, C and F of the International Astronomical Union.

Thesis title: Influence of Accuracy of Determination of Orbit of Asteroids and Comets for Prediction theirs Motions over Long Intervals of Time

Supervisor: Grzegorz Sitarski

Year of defence: 2000



Joanna Kuraszkiewicz

(Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

Thesis title: Exploring the Central Power House of Quasars via Emission Lines

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 1999



Sławomira Szutowicz

(Space Research Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Thesis title: Analysis of Physical Properties of a Cometary Nucleus Based on Investigations of Nongravitational Perturbations in the Orbital Motion of a Comet

Supervisor: Grzegorz Sitarski

Year of defence: 1999



Sławomir Górny

Thesis title: Planetary Nebulae with Wolf-Rayet Type Central Stars

Supervisor: Romuald Tylenda

Year of defence: 1998



Rafał Moderski

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Reasons for Bimodal Distribution of Jet Activity of Quasars

Supervisor: Marek Sikora

Year of defence: 1998



Dorota Rosińska

(University of Warsaw)

Thesis title: Pulsations and Stability of Neutron Stars and Strange Stars

Supervisor: Paweł Haensel

Year of defence: 1998



Mirosław Schmidt

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Thesis title: Analysis of the Spectroscopic Observations of Hypergiant HR 8752 with Application of Atmosperic Models

Supervisor: Romuald Tylenda

Year of defence: 1998



Jerzy Krzesiński

(Astronomical Observatory of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland)

Thesis title: Niestabilność pulsacyjna gwiazd wczesnych typów widmowych podwójnej gromady h oraz x Persei

Supervisor: Jerzy M. Kreiner

Year of defence: 1997



Ewa Łokas

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Statistics and Dynamics of Large Scale Cosmic Fields in Weakly Nonlinear Regime

Supervisor: Roman Juszkiewicz

Year of defence: 1997



Beata Mazur

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Poszukiwanie gwiazd zmiennych w gromadach kulistych i starych gromadach otwartych

Supervisor: Janusz Kałużny

Year of defence: 1997



Danuta Dobrzycka

(European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany)

Thesis title: The Long - and Short - Timescale Light Variations in Symbiotic Stars

Supervisor: Joanna Mikołajewska

Year of defence: 1996



Andrzej Maciołek-Niedźwiecki

(University of Lodz, Poland)

Thesis title: The Effect of Electron-Positron Pair Production and Thermal Conduction in Compact Objects

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 1996



Paweł Magdziarz

Thesis title: Variable Radiation From Jets and x/gamma Emission From AGNs

Supervisor: Jerzy Machalski

Year of defence: 1996



Daniel Proga

(University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA)

Daniel Proga is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He was born and raised in Brzeziny, Łódź Voivodeship, Poland. He studied astronomy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and earned his master's degree in 1990 under supervision of Prof. Andrzej Strobel. He then spent three years as a predoctoral fellow  at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,MA, USA, where he worked with Dr. Scott Kenyon. After obtaining his PhD degree he worked at Imperial College (London, UK), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, MD, USA), University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, USA), and Princeton University  (Princeton, NJ, USA). His main interests are mass accretion processes onto compact objects and related mass outflows in systems such as quasars and X-ray binaries.He uses primarily numerical methods for astrophysical fluid dynamics to study effects of radiation and magnetic fields on gas under the influence of gravity. He also works on photoionization and radiative transfer processes.

Thesis title: Illumination in Symbiotic Binary Stars: NLTE Photoionization Models

Supervisor: Joanna Mikołajewska

Year of defence: 1996



Piotr Życki

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Piotr Zycki started working in CAMK as research assistant in 1991. He got his PhD in 1995 and then spent three years at University of Durham (UK) as a post-doc, collaborating with Chris Done. After returning to CAMK he continues his research in Warsaw. He obtained the 'habilitacja' degree in 2002. In 2008 he received the title of professor. His research interests revolve around accretion onto compact objects, mostly black holes. He has done various aspects of data analysis and simulations on spectral and temporal properties of X-ray emission from accretion flows. He is especially interested in properties of quasi-periodic oscillations (QPO) in X-rays, which he studies with the goal of constraining possible models of QPO. He is also involved with the institute administration and management, serving as the institute director 2014-2022.

 

Thesis title: X-Ray Emission and Reprocessing in Active Galactic Nuclei

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 1995



Michał Chodorowski

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Wtórne grawitacyjne anizotropie mikrofalowego promieniowania tła

Supervisor: Marek Demiański

Year of defence: 1994



Piotr Jaranowski

(University of Białystok, Poland)

Thesis title: Analysis of the Gravitational Wave Signal from a Compact Binary System

Supervisor: Andrzej Królak

Year of defence: 1994



Radosław Stompor

(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie, France)

Thesis title: Całkowanie równania Boltzmanna dla fotonów w rozszerzającym się Wszechświecie

Supervisor: Marek Demiański

Year of defence: 1994



Adam Dobrzycki

(European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany)

Thesis title: Widmo liniowe kwazarów

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 1991



Aneta Siemiginowska

(Chandra X-ray Center of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

 

Aneta Siemiginowska is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Chandra X-ray Center of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She has worked in both theoretical and observational aspects of X-ray astronomy with interests in extragalactic radio sources, quasars, powerful jets and statistical methods. She is a founding member of the CHASC Astrostatistics Center, promoting collaborations between astrophysicists and statisticians. Her main statistical interests include principled and advanced statistical methods for high energy astrophysics data. She studies extragalactic radio sources and quasars, and has discovered a number of hundred-kiloparsec long relativistic X-ray jets associated with distant quasars.

Thesis title: Thin accretion disks in Active Galactic Nuclei: theory and observations

Supervisor: Bożena Czerny

Year of defence: 1991



Ryszard Szczerba

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Toruń)

Ryszard Szczerba was born and raised in Warmia, in north-eastern Poland. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, obtaining a master's degree in theoretical physics (in particular quantum mechanics). His interests changed, however, and in 1991 he obtained a PhD in astrophysics at our Institute under the supervision of prof. Romuald Tylenda. One of the results of this work was the photoionization code used by others, but also included in the time-dependent photoionization code developed by students and collaborators of prof. Detlef Schoenberner. After obtaining his PhD, he completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute d'Astrophysique de Paris working with prof. Alain Omont, and then a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary working with prof. Sun Kwok. After returning to CAMK in 1995, he developed collaboration with many groups and individuals in Europe and beyond, incl. Profs. Grażyna Stasińska (Muedon), Detlef Schoenberner (Kiel / Potsdam), Thomas Henning (Jena / Heidelberg), Peisheng Chen (Kunming), Biwei Jiang (Beijng), Jurgen Stutzki (Koeln), and Drs. Pedro Garcia-Lario (ESAC/Madrid), Kevin Volk (Baltimore), Dr. Eric Lagadec (Nice). In 2000, he obtained his habilitation at CAMK for the work "Stationary and hydrodynamic models of dust-gas envelopes around AGB and post-AGB stars: analysis of infrared spectral features". In 2008, he received the title of professor from the President of the Republic of Poland and was appointed to the position of professor at CAMK. His interests are mainly related to the study of evolved stars by means of space based observations in infrared and at submillimeter spectral range. He was the lead co-I for Poland on the Herschel / HIFI instrument and a member of the SPICA Heads of Nations before the mission was removed from the M5 competition by ESA. Since 2015, he is serving as the Chairman of the Scientific Council of our Institute.

Thesis title: Testing the evolution of planetary nebulae with distance-independent methods

Supervisor: Romuald Tylenda

Year of defence: 1991



Magdalena Zbyszewska

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Efekt Comptona i proces produkcji par pozyton-elektron w astrofizyce wysokich energii

Supervisor: Andrzej Zdziarski

Year of defence: 1991



Stanisław Zoła

(Astronomical Observatory of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland)

Thesis title: Alaliza fotoelektrycznych krzywych zmian blasku układów typu algola z dyskami akrecyjnymi: RZ Oph i KU Cyg

Supervisor: Józef Smak

Year of defence: 1991



Paweł Artymowicz

(University of Toronto, Canada)

Pawel Artymowicz studied astronomy and physics at Warsaw University, and worked on his PhD thesis (defended at CAMK) at Space Telescope Sci. Institute in Baltimore. He was a NASA Hubble Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in California, senior researcher and assistant prof. in Stockholm University, and from 2005 full prof. of Physics and Astrophysics at University of Toronto. His highly cited work deals with the origin and evolution of binary and planetary systems, both analytically and numerically. He builds supercomputing clusters. Following a Polish presidential plane catastrophe in 2010, as scientist and pilot with 22 years of experience he has helped to investigate the details of the accident.

Thesis title: Fale gęstości w galaktykach

Supervisor: Wojciech Dziembowski

Year of defence: 1990



Jadwiga Biała

(Planetarium and Astronomical Observatory in Olsztyn)

Thesis title: Zagadnienie orbit okresowych w ograniczonym problemie 4-ciał

Supervisor: Grzegorz Sitarski

Year of defence: 1989



Krzysztof Gęsicki

(Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)

Thesis title: Modelowanie profili linii dla aktywnej otoczki skrajnego nadolbrzyma Rho Cas

Supervisor: Jan Smoliński

Year of defence: 1989



Mirosław Giersz

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Physical processes in globular clusters

Supervisor: Jerzy Stodółkiewicz

Year of defence: 1989



Robert Zembowicz

Thesis title: Astrofizyka strun kosmicznych

Supervisor: Marek Demiański

Year of defence: 1989



Monika Bałucińska

(School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, UK)

Thesis title: Właściwości rentgenowskie źródła Cygnus X-1

Supervisor: Jerzy Stodółkiewicz

Year of defence: 1988



Małgorzata Królikowska

(Space Research Centre, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Thesis title: Interpretacja obserwowanych amplitud pulsacji gwiazd typu delta Scuti

Supervisor: Wojciech Dziembowski

Year of defence: 1988



Krzysztof Maślanka

(Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

After getting my PhD in cosmology, I switched to mathematics, more specifically number theory and its history. In analytical number theory, I obtained a globally convergent series expansion for the famous zeta function of Riemann (1997) ­– one of the two known so far. My results in number theory gained recognition and reception among specialists. In particular, on the basis of my representation of the zeta function, the well-known Venezuelan mathematician Luis Báez-Duarte obtained an interesting criterion for the Riemann hypothesis (2003) – the most important unsolved problem in number theory. Since 2005, after receiving my habilitation for the monograph Liczba i kwant, I have been working at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Website: http://ihnpan.pl/krzysztof-maslanka/

Thesis title: Efekty kwantowe w wielowymiarowych modelach kosmologicznych

Supervisor: Marek Demiański

Year of defence: 1988



Bożena Todorovic-Juchniewicz

Thesis title: Wpływ drobnych efektów dynamicznych i obserwacyjnych na dokładność orbity komety (na przykładzie komety P/Gunn)

Supervisor: Grzegorz Sitarski

Year of defence: 1988



Leszek Zdunik

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Phase transitions in dense matter and properties of netron stars

Supervisor: Paweł Haensel

Year of defence: 1988



Paweł Moskalik

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Okresowe cykle graniczne w teorii pulsacji gwiazd

Supervisor: Wojciech Dziembowski

Year of defence: 1987



Mirosław Panek

Thesis title: Wielkoskalowa anizotropia mikrofalowego promieniowania tła

Supervisor: Marek Demiański

Year of defence: 1987



Marek Sarna

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Akrecja materii na małomasywne gwiazdy ciągu głównego i jej wpływ na ewolucję ukadów podwójnych

Supervisor: Janusz Ziółkowski

Year of defence: 1987



Krzysztof Włodarczyk

Thesis title: Analiza zaćmień nowych karłowatych typu SU Ursae Majoris

Year of defence: 1987



Jacek Chołoniewski

Thesis title: Wyznaczanie funkcji świecenia galaktyk

Supervisor: Andrzej Kruszewski

Year of defence: 1986



Zbigniew Głownia

Thesis title: Analiza zmian okresów w kontaktowych układach podwójnych gwiazd typu W Ursae Maioris

Supervisor: Jerzy M. Kreiner

Year of defence: 1986



Zbigniew Loska

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Trójwymiarowe fale w dyskach

Supervisor: Wojciech Dziembowski

Year of defence: 1986



Bożena Czerny

(Center for Theoretical Physics of PAS)

Thesis title: Transoniczna akrecja dyskowa

Supervisor: Jerzy Stodółkiewicz

Year of defence: 1984



Michał Czerny

Thesis title: Berstery rentgenowskie

Supervisor: Jerzy Stodółkiewicz

Year of defence: 1984



Bronisław Rudak

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Toruń)

Thesis title: Model obszarów emisji liniowej w aktywnych jądrach galaktyk

Supervisor: Antoni Stawikowski

Year of defence: 1984



Mirosław Sztajno

Thesis title: Analiza porównawcza źródła rentgenowskiego SERPENS X-1

Supervisor: Józef Smak

Year of defence: 1982



Roman Schreiber

(Space Research Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Toruń)

Thesis title: Fale elektrostatyczne w jonosferze Ziemi obserwowane z pokładu satelity "INTERKOSMOS-KOPERNIK 5OO"

Supervisor: Andrzej Wernik

Year of defence: 1981



Marek Sikora

(Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center)

Thesis title: Pole promieniowania dysków akrecyjnych

Supervisor: Bohdan Paczyński

Year of defence: 1980


 

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