From a bar in Paris to the slopes of Mt Etna - astrophysics is a global activity!

One of the advantages of studying physics is that it is a global endeavour: physics is the same whether you are at home in Sydney, drinking beer at a bar in Paris, hiking up the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, or trying to keep warm at the South Pole.

2005 was a typical year for our globetrotting PhD students. Just to take a handful of examples from our astrophysicists: Aliz Derekas attended conferences in Rome and Greece; Paul Yi Tung Ooi spent a week taking a gamma-ray burst summer school on the Island of Santorini, Greece; Balthasar Indermuehle presented a talk at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich; Jessie Christiansen and Colin Bonner (a 2nd year undergraduate) spent two weeks at the South Pole, Antarctica, performing upgrades and repairs on UNSW telescopes there; Jessie also worked for 3 months at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University in the UK, visited the NASA Ames Reseach Center in California and attended conferences in France and Hawaii on the topic of extrasolar planets; Cormac Purcell worked with his collaborators at the University of Leeds, gave a talk at a workshop at the Observatoire de Paris, and, along with the entire UNSW Star Formation Group, attended a conference in Sicily.

Cormac comments: “The conference in Sicily stands out in my mind. It was interesting to put faces to names only known through the literature - often my prior mental image would be nothing like the real person (and, with my judgment of names, often a different sex!). After a week of discussions and presentations by some of the top people in the field I came away with new ideas, contacts, and a massive hangover.”

Jessie writes: “The highlight of my travel would definitely have been meeting the many intelligent people who are working on the same thing as me and being able to pick their brains for ideas and share my own.”

Many of our students hadn’t been out of Australia before starting their PhDs at UNSW. They are now seasoned travellers with broadened horizons, taking their place in the global science community.

Michael Ashley