Degree: Ph.D.
Position: Associate Professor
Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)ORCID: 0000-0002-2173-0673
Office: 126
Phone: +48 223296126
E-mail: almarkowitz@camk.edu.pl
Alex Markowitz is an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw. With his students and collaborators, he leads observational research into the physics and morphology of accretion flows onto supermassive black holes in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), including transient accretion events.
He earned his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2003, studying X-ray variability of Seyfert AGN.
He continued X-ray spectral and timing studies of AGN as a National Research Council/NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 2004 to 2007. From 2007 to 2015, he was an Assistant Project Scientist and then Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS). He was also an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Karl Remeis Observatory/Erlangen Center for Astroparticle Physics in Germany, 2011-2014 (dual affiliation with UCSD-CASS). He has been an Associate Research Scientist at UCSD-CASS since 2015, and joined CAMK PAN as an Assistant Professor (dual affiliation with UCSD-CASS and CAMK PAN) starting in 2017. He achieved the habilitation ("Determining Accretion Flows in Seyfert Active Galactic Nuclei") in 2019.
Prof. Markowitz has been involved in observations of both radio-quiet and radio-loud AGN using most current and recent X-ray telescopes (e.g., XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, Chandra, AstroSAT, RXTE, Suzaku; most recently, eROSITA), as well as several ground-based facilities (most recently, the South African Large Telescope).
He is first- or co-author on over 90 peer-reviewed articles in ApJ, MNRAS, A&A, AJ, etc. The link to his publications included by the ORCiD database can be found here.
There are currently two doctoral students under Prof. Markowitz's supervision, Saikruba Krishnan and Tathagata Saha.