Dear KIPACers,

Congratulations to the four KIPAC graduate students who recently defended their dissertations -- and to their advisors as well!

• Chris Davis (Advisor: Aaron Roodman)

• Noah Kurinsky (Advisor: Blas Cabrera)

• Devon Powell (Advisor: Tom Abel)

• Sam Totorica (Advisors: Tom Abel and Frederico Fiuza)

We also had a number of physics majors who completed their senior theses with KIPAC scientists:

• Amara McCune (Advisor: Roger Blandford)

• Joey Murphy (Advisor: Bruce Macintosh)

• Roger Romani (Advisor: Blas Cabrera)

• Erik Rosenberg (Advisor: Aaron Roodman)

• Kaitlyn Shin (Advisor: Bruce Macintosh)

Congrats to the postdoctoral fellows who are moving to new venues!  

• Ian Czekala will start a Hubble Fellowship at UC Berkeley.

• Jeff Chilcote will be starting a faculty position at University of Notre Dame.

• Mattia DiMauro will join the Fermi team at the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory  at NASA / Goddard.

• Marco Viero has just started a new position as data scientist at Wahoo Fitness, a hardware company making training tools for cycling, running, and swimming, from computers to sensors to smart trainers.

• Irina Zhuravleva will start as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.

Welcome to the new postdocs who will be arriving in the Fall:  

• Alex Amon (weak lensing and cosmology surveys) arriving from Edinburgh.

• Kirk Barrow (numerical simulations, early galaxy and supermassive black hole formation) arriving from Georgia Tech.

• Ari Cukierman (CMB) arriving from UC Berkeley.

• Ke Fang (Einstein Fellow, high energy astrophysics) arriving from the University of Maryland.

• Neil Goeckner-Wald (CMB) arriving from UC Berkeley.

• Lea Hirsch (exoplanets) arriving from UC Berkeley.

• Jessie Muir (cosmology theory and surveys) arriving from the University of Michigan.

• Maria Salatino (Research Associate, CMB) arriving from Paris Diderot University.

• Ed Young (CMB) arriving from Princeton.

• Eric Miller (LZ), arriving from the South Dakota School of Mining & Technology.

KIPAC Sierra Retreat -- We hope that many of you can attend our second KIPAC Sierra Retreat, which will be held the week before instruction begins for the Fall quarter:   Monday - Wednesday, Sept 17 - 19, 2018. Everyone is welcome, including partners and families.

If this scheduling works for you, please make sure you have signed up by entering your name in this document: https://goo.gl/cg2iHn. You will find lots more information about the Retreat, and can contribute topics for discussion by editing the list of possible topics, on our editable webpage : https://goo.gl/bnfpsw.  

KIPAC Open House [again!] a Success -- On the evening of May 5th, KIPAC hosted ~400 attendees at a successful Open House at SLAC aimed at showcasing our research to the local community.  The program included, as usual, a variety of demonstrations and short public mini-lectures followed by Q&A with the enthusiastic, curious visitors. We are particularly grateful to the KIPAC members who provided the demonstrations and lectures.  We intend to continue this successful series of open houses in the future so please start thinking of demonstrations now!

New KIPAC Postdoc Group -- We are delighted to announce that our KIPAC postdocs have recently re-organized themselves into a group aimed at encouraging discussions about various opportunities and challenges facing postdocs; e.g., scientific opportunities, future directions for their careers, administrative issues, housing challenges, etc. Postdocs are warmly encouraged to provide input on any of these issues to the KIPAC Management team.  We are pleased to have Krista Lynne Smith (usually found at SLAC) and Giuseppe Puglisi (usually found on campus) as postdoc representatives. Please discuss with them as well as with your management team anything we can do to make your postdoc experience at KIPAC even more enjoyable.

KIPAC Public Lectures -- As we announced in the previous newsletter, we have started a very successful (so far!) KIPAC Public Lecture series. The lectures are scheduled roughly every two months, and can take place at SLAC or on Campus.  We thank Dan Wilkins and Mandeep Gill for shepherding the series. The inaugural talk was given by Roger Blandford, followed by presentations by Aaron Roodman, Wendy Freedman, Martin Rees, and Daniel Holz. If any of you are interested in presenting a public lecture on a subject that might be of interest to the general public, please let Dan and Mandeep know.  

Onwards and upwards: Congratulations and a big thank you to Richard Dubois who has taken on the role of Deputy Associate Lab Director for Operations of the Fundamental Physics Directorate at SLAC. And similarly to Dan Akerib who became Deputy Associate Lab Director for Research of the Fundamental Physics Directorate at SLAC. We wish them both much success and appreciate all their help for our research program, and for the smooth running of SLAC and KIPAC.

Best wishes,

Greg, Pat, Risa, Tom & Ziba