New Scientists in the Fellow-Program

The Excellence Cluster Universe welcomes two new Research Fellows: Dr. Nadine Neumayer and Dr. Sinéad McGlynn. Both observational astrophysicists joined the Cluster’s research area F, which focuses on the question how black holes formed and evolved.

Previously, Nadine Neumayer was a Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching and already involved in the Cluster’s research network as a Junior Principal Investigator. Her research interest includes the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies, black holes mass modeling, and nuclear star clusters. For her research work, Nadine received several renowned awards. Among them, the Otto-Hahn Medal by the Max-Planck-Society for her outstanding PhD thesis on “The nucleus of Centaurus A”.

Sinéad McGlynn held a Postdoctoral position at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm lastly, and has been a full member of the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) collaboration. She has been focusing on the data analysis and methods employed by this collaboration. Additionally, she has been involved in a number of significant papers on gamma ray bursts (GRB) published by the collaboration. At the Cluster, Sinéad will remain involved in GRB research.

With the arrival of Nadine Neumayer and Sinéad McGlynn at the Cluster, the majority of the Cluster’s Fellow positions have now for the first time been assigned to female researchers (five out of nine). “In our advertisements we especially encourage female scientists to apply for our Fellowship program. We are glad that in an excellent field of applicants two female researchers have accomplished those Fellowships”, says the Cluster’s General Manager Dr. Birgit Schaffhauser. “For this reason, we have now come a big step towards our objective to increase the number of female scientists at the Cluster.”