Invited Plenaries
Prof. Dr. Kai Zuber, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Biography:
- 1990 Diploma degree at University of Heidelberg working on the solar neutrino experiment GALLEX
- 1992 PhD degree at University of Heidelberg working on the Heidelberg-Moscow double beta decay experiment
- 1993-1996 Postdoc at University of Heidelberg working in the H1 experiment at HERA (DESY)
- 1996-2002 Postdoc at University of Dortmund working on the NOMAD and HARP experiment at CERN
- 2002-2005 Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Society (DFG) performed at Oxford University working on SNO and HARP
- 2005-2008 Senior lecturer/reader at University of Sussex working on SNO and COBRA
- Since June 2008 : Head of the Nuclear Physics Department at TU Dresden working on COBRA, GERDA, SNO+, Borexino, COMET
Books:
H.V. Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, K.Zuber: Particle Astrophysics (in german, english, russian) 1997
K. Zuber: Neutrino physics, IOP Publ. 2004
Prof. Silke Bühler-Paschen, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna
Biography:
Silke Bühler-Paschen is an experimental condensed matter physicist, working on strongly correlated electron systems and thermoelectrics. She graduated in physics from Graz University of Technology in 1992, with an external diploma work at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. After her PhD studies at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and a postdoctoral stay at ETH Zurich she moved to Germany, where she joined the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, first as scientific collaborator and then as associate professor. After a visiting professorship at the Nagoya University in Japan she was appointed full professor at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria where she has served for eight years as Head of the Institute for Solid State Physics. She received a C3 professorship from the Excellence Program of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Outstanding Female Scientist in 2003 and an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in 2008. She is APS fellow and leader of various national and international research projects. Her team is active in materials synthesis and characterization, using a large pool of different physical property measurements under multiple extreme conditions ? spanning, for instance, seven orders of magnitude in temperature. Topics of current interest include quantum criticality, heavy fermion systems, Kondo insulators, and thermoelectric clathrates. She has a broad international collaboration network of experimentalists and theorists.
Plenary Title: New trends in strongly correlated materials
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Dr. Wynand Louw, National Metrology Institute of South Africa, South Africa.
Biography:
Plenary Title: The SI Redefined: Counting Atoms, Single-Electron Tunnelling and Optical Atomic Clocks
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Prof. Pauline Gagnon, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland
Biography:
Pauline Gagnon was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. After teaching physics for a few years in local colleges, she moved to California, where, she first studied at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She then started her research activities at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva, with Carleton University then became Senior Research Scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. Within the ATLAS Collaboration, she searched for dark matter in the decays of the Higgs boson and for hypothetical dark photons. From 2011 until 2014, she worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become her trademark. Since 2013, she has given more than sixty presentations to large audiences in seven countries. She wrote a popular science book on particle physics: Who Cares about Particle Physics: Making Sense of the Higgs boson, the LHC and CERN in the hope to reach even larger audiences since particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!
Plenary Title: Women and diversity in Physics
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Prof. Steven M. Kahn, Stanford University, United States of America
Biography:
Professor Kahn is the Director of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a large-aperture wide-field telescope now under development to survey half the sky every few nights. As Director he oversees all aspects of the project construction, as well as the interactions with both federal funding agencies, and with the external scientific community.
LSST will detect over three billion galaxies, providing detailed measurements of their red shifts, shapes, and properties. Through a technique called weak gravitational lensing, these data can be used to map out the structure of dark matter in the universe, and how that structure has evolved with cosmic time. The results will provide very sensitive constraints on the nature of dark matter and dark energy. LSST also provides crucial data on the structure of the outer regions of the Milky Way, makes a census of moving objects in the solar system, and discovers transient phenomena in the universe on a wide range of timescales.
Kahn did his undergraduate work at Columbia College and graduated summa cum laude in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1980.He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1980-82.
Kahn has previously served as the Associate Laboratory Director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also been the Chair of the Physics Department at Stanford and Columbia Universities, and the Director, Deputy Director, or Associate Director of major interdisciplinary research laboratories at three universities; the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford, the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory at Columbia, and the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley. He has made significant contributions to X-ray astronomy, specifically with respect to high resolution X-ray spectroscopy of cosmic sources. He was the US Principal Investigator for the development of the Reflection Grating Spectrometer, which is currently flying on the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory.
Kahn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Plenary Title: Probing the Mystery of Dark Energy With Billions of Galaxies
Plenary Title: Probing the Mystery of Dark Energy With Billions of Galaxies
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Prof. Manfred Hellberg, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa
Biography:
Manfred Hellberg is an Emeritus Professor at UKZN. After his BSc (Hons) at UCT (1959), his PhD in theoretical plasma physics from Cambridge University (1965) centred on one of the first computer simulation studies, using facilities at Culham, the UKAEA fusion research laboratory. Following a Culham Research Associateship he joined the University of Natal (Durban), from which he formally retired in 2003, after spells as HoD, Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor. He has spent sabbatical leaves in Princeton, Garching, Stockholm, Austin, Ghent, Bochum, and Sydney. After his initial computer modelling, he switched to fusion-related diffusion studies, before shifting his interests to waves in plasmas. In the 1990’s he embarked on two research themes: kinetic theory of the effects of excess superthermal particles on waves in space-related plasmas, and multi-fluid modelling of nonlinear electrostatic structures (solitons and double layers) in multi-component plasmas. Since retirement he has actively continued his research in these two areas, as well as teaching a NASSP module. Hellberg is a Fellow of the UK Institute of Physics, the SAIP and the Royal Society of SA, member of ASSAf and a Humboldt Research Fellow. He was on the IUPAP International Plasma Physics Commission (1987-96; Secretary 1993-6) and on numerous international conference committees, convened the DST-NRF-SAIP International Panel, “Shaping the Future of Physics in SA”, in 2004 and headed the DST Astronomy Desk in 2010-11. He served as President of SAIP and on Advisory Boards of the National Astronomical Facilities and the National Laser Centre. Hellberg was awarded the SAIP De Beers Gold Medal in 2014.
Plenary Title: Fire, Flares and Fusion: Some wanderings in Plasmaland
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Biography:
Larry McLerran received BS (1971) and PhD (1975) degrees from the University of Washington. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT (1975-1978), and SLAC (1978-1980), an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Washington (1980-1984), a member of the permanent scientific staff at Fermilab (1984-1988), and a Professor at University of Minnesota, (1984-1999), where he was the first director of the William Fine Theoretical Physics Institute (1989-1992). In 1999, he became a Senior Scientist at BNL. He has been Group Leader for Nuclear Theory and for RIKEN-BNL Center. He will soon become the Director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle.
His awards include the Alfred Sloan Fellowship, Alexander Humboldt Prize which supported stays at Frankfurt University, Hans Jensen Prize at University of Heidelberg, Honorary PhD, the Liu Lian Shou Professorship at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, the Feshbach Prize for Theoretical Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society and a PhD Honoris Causa from the Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland..
He was involved in early studies of the Quark Gluon Plasma developing perturbative and Monte Carlo methods. He and collaborators recently argued the existence of high baryon density Quarkyonic Matter. He computed the rate of baryon number violation in electroweak theory. He did pioneering work on the properties of ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, estimating achievable energy densities. He and collaborators argued that a high gluon density Color Glass Condensate (CGC) controls the initial stages of nuclear collisions. After the collision, the CGC forms a highly coherent ensemble of colored fields called the Glasma,. The Glasma eventually evolves into a thermalized Quark Gluon Plasma. He and collaborators argued that anomalous configurations of the matter produced in heavy ion collisions can generate a Chiral Magnetic Effect. In 2005, he and Miklos Gyulassy that a Quark Gluon Plasma had been made at RHIC from the initial CGC of the nuclei.
Plenary Title: Strongly Interacting Matter at High Energy Density
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Prof. Peter Butler, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Biography:
Peter Butler is a Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool. He was educated at King's College London and the University of Liverpool. As a recipient of a SRC/NATO Fellowship and as a staff member at M.I.T. he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during 1974-1977 before returning to Liverpool in 1978. He held a SRC Advanced Fellowship during 1978-83 and became a Lecturer in the department of Physics in 1983. He was a Visiting Scientist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in 1985 and 1990 and was Visiting Scientist and Experienced Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä in 1994, 1995 and 1999-2000. He was head of the ISOLDE group at CERN 2002-2005, and has been strongly involved in the HIE-ISOLDE, EURISOL and TSR (Test Storage Ring) projects. He has also been active in developing instrumentation for nuclear spectroscopy, in particular conversion-electron spectroscopy, and has applied these to the studies of the shapes of heavy and superheavy nuclei. He is an expert on the properties of reflection-asymmetric or "pear-shaped" nuclei, having written three review articles on this topic. In 2012 he received the Institute of Physics Rutherford Medal and Prize for his contributions to the field of experimental nuclear physics.
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Invited Speakers : Silver Medallist Lectures
Dr. Angela Dudley, CSIR National Laser Centre, South Africa
Biography:
After receiving her MSc in Physics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Angela joined the CSIR National Laser Centre (NLC) on a PhD studentship in 2008. Her PhD research realised two novel measurement techniques for optical fields.
She received her PhD in June 2012 from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and subsequently commenced a Postdoctoral Fellowship within the Mathematical Optics group at the NLC. Her research has resulted in 22 peer-reviewed journal articles and 25 international conference proceedings. She has been awarded two SPIE scholarships and the 2012 CSIR Excellence Award for ‘Outstanding Performance by a PhD Student’. In 2015 she was the recipient of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) Silver Jubilee medal. She has been invited to spend time in overseas laboratories such as the University of Glasgow, North Carolina State University and the City College of New York. Currently, she is a senior researcher at the NLC and holds a visiting lecturer position at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is also serving her second 6-year term on the Optical Society of America’s (OSA) Membership and Education Services (MES) council.
She received her PhD in June 2012 from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and subsequently commenced a Postdoctoral Fellowship within the Mathematical Optics group at the NLC. Her research has resulted in 22 peer-reviewed journal articles and 25 international conference proceedings. She has been awarded two SPIE scholarships and the 2012 CSIR Excellence Award for ‘Outstanding Performance by a PhD Student’. In 2015 she was the recipient of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) Silver Jubilee medal. She has been invited to spend time in overseas laboratories such as the University of Glasgow, North Carolina State University and the City College of New York. Currently, she is a senior researcher at the NLC and holds a visiting lecturer position at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is also serving her second 6-year term on the Optical Society of America’s (OSA) Membership and Education Services (MES) council.
Lecture Title: Manipulating Structured Light
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Dr. Shazrene Mohamed, SA Astronomical Observatory, South Africa
Biography:
Dr. Shazrene Mohamed is a computational astrophysicist working at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). She completed her undergraduate studies in Astronomy, Astrophysics and Mathematics at Harvard University and obtained her PhD in Astrophysics from Oxford University. After two years as an Argelander Fellow in Bonn, Germany, she moved to Cape Town where she is currently an NRF Research Career Advancement (RCA) fellow. She is a Rhodes Scholar, a NRF P-rated researcher and recipient of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) Silver Jubilee Medal. Her research primarily focuses on supercomputer simulations of evolved stars to investigate how they interact with their surroundings and with each other, particularly, how mass is transferred from one star to another. These systems are important as they are thought to be the progenitors of novae and supernovae explosions.
Lecture Title: 3D Models of Stellar Wind Interactions
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Lecture Title: 3D Models of Stellar Wind Interactions
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