Astronomy on Tap

Gautham Narayan is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He works on wide-field surveys - telescopes that cover vast swaths of the sky each night.  He uses these maps of the sky to study the  dynamics and composition of the Universe, particularly with stars that blow up – supernovae! His group does cutting edge work to adapt artificial intelligence techniques to astrophysics, to find rare and unusual supernovae, understand their physics and the nature of the galaxies they blow up in, and builds the core tools to enable the astrophysics community to work together, connecting different experiments across the electromagnetic and gravitational wave spectrum.

He did his doctoral work at Harvard University, worked for the NSF’s National Optical and Infrared Laboratory at Kitt Peak in Tucson, AZ and the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs Hubble and JWST in Baltimore, before moving to Illinois in 2019. He helped establish Astronomy on Tap in both Tucson and Baltimore, and now in Champaign-Urbana. He is a Simonyi-NSF CAREER Fellow and Deputy Director of the NSF-Simons AI for the Sky (SkAI) Institute in Chicago. When he is not at work, you can find him hiking, biking, playing with the dogs or attempting to combine any two of those with varying degrees of success.

Vivian U is an observational astronomer at the University of California, Irvine. She received her bachelor’s degree in Astrophysics from Caltech and PhD in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is currently a co-chair of the Habitable Worlds Observatory AGN Working Group and of the NASA Cosmic Origins AGN Science Interest Group Leadership Council. Vivian was a recipient of the 2020 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, and was named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2019. She was featured on PBS NOVA in the Episode “New Eye on the Universe”, and was a speaker at the 2024 TEDxManhattanBeach event.