TAP Colloquia
Each semester the TAP Colloquia Committee invites new speakers working across all fields of theoretical astrophysics to share their current research. Along with providing a one-hour colloquium, each speaker also meets with faculty and students while on campus to discuss research more in depth. The TAP Colloquia series offers 5-6 talks on a bi-weekly basis. The goal of this program activity is to bring scholars to the UA campus to discuss new research, support shared research efforts and cross-fertilization, and increase awareness and communication across the broader U.S. community working in theoretical astrophysics.
Colloquia are held in person in the Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences Building,
Room 312 on alternating Mondays, 3:30 - 4:30 pm.
Please join us for refreshments starting at 3:00 pm in the Kuiper 3rd Floor Atrium.
Upcoming Colloquia
Fall 2026 Colloquia
Lucy McNeill, Kyoto University
September 14, 2026
Title: Some New Ideas in Stellar Explosions
Fall 2026 Meet Yourself Event
September 28, 2026
Featuring University of Arizona Postdocs and Graduate Students
Matthew Johnson, York University and Perimeter Institute
October 12, 2026
Title: Reflections on the Cosmic Microwave Background
Matthew Golden, Los Alamos National Laboratory
October 26, 2026
Title: Fighting the Curse of Dimensionality in Kinetic Simulations
Ben Chandran, University of New Hampshire
November 30, 2026
Title: How Alfven-Wave Turbulence Powers the Solar Wind and Other Astrophysical Outflows
Do you have a speaker in mind? Submit your suggestions here Speaker Suggestion Form.
Sign-up here for the TAP Newsletter to receive details for each upcoming talk.
Previous Colloquia
Check out Guest Speaker Talks on our You Tube channel.
Spring 2026 Colloquia
Chihway Chang, University of Chicago
February 9, 2026
Title: Mapping Cosmic Structure: Past 10 years, Next 10 years
Spring 2026 TAP Meet Yourself Event
February 16, 2026
Featuring University of Arizona Graduate Students
Brandon Barker, Los Alamos National Laboratory
March 2, 2026
Title: From Light Curves to Physics: Inference and Modeling Challenges in Supernova Explosions
Mohammad Farhat, UC Berkeley
March 23, 2026
Title: Dynamics in Extreme Environments: From Lava to Tatooine Planets
Sóley Hyman, TAP Graduate Student Research Prize Awardee
April 6, 2026
Title: PECCARY: A Novel Approach for Characterizing Orbital Complexity, Stochasticity, and Regularity
Fall 2025 Colloquia
TAP "Meet Yourself" Event
September 15, 2025
University of Arizona Postdocs & Graduate Students
Chiaki Kobayashi, University of Hertfordshire
September 22, 2025
Title: Cosmic Chemical Enrichment in the Era of JWST
Cristiano Longarini, Cambridge University
October 6, 2025
TAP Planet Formation Initiative Lecture and Colloquium
Title: The Role of Self-gravity and Gravitational Instabilities in Protoplanetary Discs
David Minton, Purdue University
October 20, 2025
TAP Planet Formation Initiative Lecture & Colloquium
Title: Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Modeling Collisional Fragmentation During Planet and Satellite Formation
Gabriela Sato-Polito, Institute for Advanced Study
November 3, 2025
Title: Pulsar Timing Arrays: A New Window into the Gravitational-wave Sky
Elias Most, California Institute of Technology
November 17, 2025
Title: Spacetime in Turmoil: Insights into Merging Black Holes and Neutron Stars from Computational Relativistic Astrophysics
Spring 2025 Colloquia
TAP "Meet Yourself" Event, UArizona Postdocs & Grad Students
January 27, 2025
Spring 2025 “Meet Yourself” Event
Featuring UArizona Grad Students
Dr. Yu-Dai Tsai, Los Alamos National Laboratory
February 3, 2025
Title: Detecting Dark Matter (Gravitationally) in the Solar System - Planetary Defense, Space Mission & Quantum Sensors
Yangyang Cai, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
February 17, 2025
Yangyang is the 2024 TAP Research Prize Awardee
Title: Dynamics of Ultra-relativistic Charged Particles with Strong Radiation Reaction. II. Aristotelian Equilibrium State
2025 Research Prize Awardee, Eonho Chang
March 3, 2025
Title: Halfway to Rayleigh” and Other Insights into the Rossby Wave Instability
W.L. Kimmy Wu, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
March 24, 2025
Title: Testing inflation and the standard cosmological model with the cosmic microwave background
Rosalba Perna, Stony Brook University
Apri 7, 2025
Title: Electromagnetic Transients in the Disks of Active Galactic Nuclei
Edwin Kite, University of Chicago
April 21, 2025
Title: A Case for Mars Terraforming Research
Fall 2024 Colloquia
TAP "Meet Yourself" Event, UArizona Postdocs & Grad Students
September 9, 2024
Fall 2024 "Meet Yourself" Event
Featuring UArizona Grad Students
No Recording Available
Shazrene Mohamed, University of Virginia
October 14, 2024
Title: The Physics of Interacting Cool Giants: Wind, collisions, and Explosions
No Recording Available
Nicholas Wogan, NASA Ames Research Center
November 4, 2024
TAP Colloquia & Planet Formation Initiative Lecture
TITLE: The Photochemistry and Climate of Foreign Atmospheres: Implications for the Origin of Life on Early Earth and Understanding Exoplanets Observed by the James Webb Space Telescope
Sultan Hassan, New York University
November 18, 2024
TITLE: Naturally Reproducing JWST Observations with New Numerically-Calibrated Models of Star Formation
Ann-Marie Madigan, University of Colorado, Boulder
December 2, 2024
TITLE: Forming the Kuiper Cliff
Spring 2024 Colloquia
Floor Broekgaarden, Columbia University, CCA, John Hopkins University
January 22, 2024
TITLE: Gravitational Wave Paleontology: A New Frontier to Explore the Formation, Lives, and Deaths of Stars to the Edge of our Observable Universe
William Coulton, University of Cambridge
February 5, 2024
TITLE: New Views of Galaxy Groups and Clusters with Precision CMB Measurements
Ana Lobo, University of California Irvine
February 19, 2024
TITLE: Climate Regimes Across the Habitable Zones of Dim Stars
Gil Holder, University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign
March 11, 2024
TITLE: New views of structure in the universe: galaxies, high-energy neutrinos, and the CMB
Joonas Nättilä, Columbia University, CCA
March 25, 2024
TITLE: Extreme Plasma Physics Around Neutron Stars and Black Holes
Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, Carnegie Observatories
April 8, 2024
TITLE: More Pixels, More Stars, More Physics: Probing Late-Stage Massive Star Evolution with Cutting-Edge Datasets
Vera Gluscevic, University of Southern California
April 22, 2024
TITLE: The Universe We Cannot See
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
| TAP "Meet Yourself" Event | University of Arizona | August 28, 2023 |
| Haowen Zhang | University of Arizona | September 11, 2023 |
| Yao-Yuan Mao | University of Utah | September 25, 2023 |
| Kaze Wong | Flatiron Institute – CCA | October 23, 2023 |
| Neil Cornish | Montana State University | November 6, 2023 |
| Alexander Philippov | University of Maryland | November 20, 2023 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| TAP “MEET YOURSELF” EVENT | University of Arizona | January 30, 2023 |
| Mikhail Ivanov | Hubble, Institute for Advanced Study | February 20, 2023 |
| Brian Metzger | Columbia University | February 27, 2023 |
| Martin Pessah | Niels Bohr Institute | March 13, 2023 |
| Jorge Moreno Soto | Pomona College | March 27, 2023 |
| Caroline Morley | University of Texas – Austin | April 10, 2023 |
| Susan Clark | Stanford University | April 24, 2023 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Gabriele Bozzola | University of Arizona | August 29, 2022 |
| Tanvi Karwal | University of Pennsylvania | September 12, 2022 |
| Saverio Cambioni | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | October 3, 2022 |
| Michael Kesden | University of Texas – Dallas | October 24, 2022 |
| Emily Cunningham | Columbia University | November 7, 2022 |
| Miki Nakajima | University of Rochester | November 21, 2022 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Rebekah Dawson | Penn State | February 14, 2022 |
| Alexander van Engelen | Arizona State University | February 28, 2022 |
| Luca Comisso | Columbia University | March 14, 2022 |
| Ferah Munshi | University of Oklahoma | March 28, 2022 |
| Michi Baubock | University of Illinois | April 11, 2022 |
| Kimberly Boddy | University of Texas | April 25, 2022 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Nicolas Garavito-Camargo | Flatiron, CCA | September 27, 2021 |
| Jimmy Juno | University of Iowa | October 11, 2021 |
| Xiangcheng Ma | University of Arizona | November 8, 2021 |
| Darin Ragozzine | Brigham Young University | November 22, 2021 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Seth Jacobson | Michigan State University | April 9, 2021 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Emily Lichko | University of Arizona | September 14, 2020 |
| Oliver Gressel | AIP, Leibniz Institute fr Astrophysics Potsdam | October 5, 2020 |
| Jens Jasche | Stockholm University | October 19, 2020 |
| Debora Sijacki | Cambridge Institute of Astronomy | November 2, 2020 |
| Barbara Ercolano | Max Planck Research School on Astrophysics at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich | November 30, 2020 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Fred Adams | University of Michigan | January 27, 2020 |
| Nicole Lloyd-Ronning | Los Alamos National Laboratory | February 10, 2020 |
| Antonija Oklopcic | Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian | February 24, 2020 |
| Andreu Font-Ribera | University College London | March 16, 2020 |
| Colby Haggarty | University of Chicago | April 27, 2020 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Ruth Murray-Clay | Univ. of California Santa Cruz | September 9, 2019 |
| Hagai Perets | Technion Israel Institute of Technology | September 23, 2019 |
| Kat Volk | University of Arizona | October 7, 2019 |
| Marco Raveri | University of Pennsylvania | October 21, 2019 |
| Matthew Kunz | Princeton University | November 4, 2019 |
| David Nesvorny | Southwest Research Institute- Boulder | November 18, 2019 |
| Camille Avestruz | University of Michigan | December 2, 2019 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Yacine Ali-Haïmoud | New York University | January 14, 2019 |
| Kyle Parfrey | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | February 11, 2019 |
| Ken Shen | University of California- Berkeley | February 25, 2019 |
| Kent Yagi | University of Virginia | March 11, 2019 |
| Joshua Lothringer | University of Arizona – TAP Student Research Prize Recipient | April 1, 2019 |
| Eve Lee | Caltech | April 15, 2019 |
| Yanqin Wu | University of Toronto | April 29, 2019 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Jia Liu | Princeton | September 17, 2018 |
| Konstantin Batygin | CalTech | October 1, 2018 |
| Shea Garrison-Kimmel | CalTech | October 15, 2018 |
| Monica Valluri | University of Michigan | October 29, 2018 |
| Gil Holder | University of Illinois | November 19, 2018 |
| Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz | University of California- Santa Cruz | December 3, 2018 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Kathryn Johnston | Columbia University | February 19, 2018 |
| Jim Stone | Princeton University | March 12, 2018 |
| Graciela Gelmini | UCLA | March 19, 2018 |
| Rachel Somerville | Rutgers University | March 26, 2018 |
| Aaron Zimmerman | University of Toronto | April 9, 2018 |
| Emily Rauscher | University of Michigan | April 23, 2018 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay | UC Davis | August 28, 2017 |
| Daniel Tamayo | University of Toronto | September 11, 2017 |
| Chris Hayward | Flatiron Institute | October 2, 2017 |
| Annika Peter | Ohio State University | October 16, 2017 |
| Renee Hlozek | University of Toronto | November 27, 2017 |
| Jim Fuller | Caltech | December 4, 2017 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| David Radice | Princeton University | March 20, 2017 |
| Elisabeth Krause | Stanford University | March 24, 2017 |
| Matt Hedman | Cornell University | March 27, 2017 |
| Simeon Bird | John Hopkins University | March 30, 2017 |
| Vasileios Paschalidis | Princeton University | April 10, 2017 |
| Zhaohuan Zhu | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | April 14, 2017 |
| Gongjie Lie | Harvard University | April 17, 2017 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Ann-Marie Madigan | Berkley | September 26, 2016 |
| Alexandre Lazarian | U of Wisconsin-Madison | October 10, 2016 |
| Francis Nimmo | U California, Santa Cruz | October 24, 2016 |
| Laura Blecha | U Maryland, College Park | November 7, 2016 |
| Will East | Perimeter Institute | November 21, 2016 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Andy Strominger | Harvard University | January 25, 2016 |
| Robin Canup | Southwest Research Institute | February 22, 2016 |
| Jerry Sellwood | Rutgers University | February 1, 2016 |
| Matthew Baring | Rice University (Houston) | March 7, 2016 |
| Myoungwon Jeon | University of Texas | March 21, 2016 |
| Ewine Van Dishoeck | April 4, 2016 | |
| Tracy Slatyer | MIT | April 11, 2016 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Showman | University of Arizona | September 14, 2015 |
| Jeremy Heyl | U of British Colombia | September 28, 2015 |
| Dimitrios Psaltis | University of Arizona | October 12, 2015 |
| Norbert Wex | Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomie | October 26, 2015 |
| Eliot Quataert | UC Berkeley | November 9, 2015 |
| Diego Munoz | Cornell University | November 23, 2015 |
| Tessa Baker | Oxford University | December 7, 2015 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Jonathan Mitchell | UCLA | February 9, 2015 |
| Cameron Hummels | UA | February 23, 2015 |
| Eliot Quataert | Berkeley | March 9, 2015 |
| Cathie Clarke | IoA, UK | March 23, 2015 |
| Smadar Naoz | UCLA | April 6, 2015 |
| Norbert Wex | MPIfR Germany | April 20, 2015 |
| Cora Dvorkin | Harvard | April 27, 2015 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Evan Scannapieco | ASU | October 6, 2014 |
| Nick Cowen | Amherst College | October 20, 2014 |
| Phil Armitage | U of Colorado, Boulder | November 3, 2014 |
| Priya Natarayanan | Yale | November 17, 2014 |
| Evan Schneider | UA Astronomy | December 8, 2014 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Peter Behroozi | Stanford University | January 14, 2013 |
| Konstantin Batygin | Caltech GPS | January 28, 2013 |
| David Arnet | UA | February 4, 2013 |
| Charlie Conroy | UCSC | March 4, 2013 |
| Lars Hernquist | Harvard University | March 18, 2013 |
| Yoram Lithwick | Northwestern University | April 1, 2013 |
| Zhi-Yun Li | University of Virginia | April 22, 2013 |
| Herve Dole | April 29, 2013 |
| Name | Affiliation | Colloquia Date |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Burrows | Princeton | September 10, 2012 |
| Doug Lin | UC Santa Cruz | October 8, 2012 |
| Rebekah Dawson | Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics | October 22, 2012 |
| Eugene Chiang | Berkeley | October 29, 2012 |
| Charlie Conroy | UC Santa Cruz | November 5, 2012 |
| Phil Arras | Univ of Virginia | November 19, 2012 |
| Mark Vogelsberger | CfA | December 3, 2012 |
| Siming Liu | Purple Mountain Observatory | December 10, 2012 |