Alumni


 

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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


 

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