Sophie and Tycho Brahe Program

The Brahe research program funds visiting professorships named after the most eminent astrophysicist Denmark has ever produced. Its purpose is to promote and create strong international connections and collaborations in astrophysics.

The current visiting professors are

Jane Lixin Dai - Professor at HKU
Laura Lopez - Professor at OSU
Ryan Foley - Professor at UCSC
Jonathan Gair -Professor at Edinburgh
Ashley Zauderer- NSF Grant Director and Radio Astronomer

Former Brahe Visiting Professors:

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, University of California at Santa Cruz. Enrico's research focuses on the violent universe with an emphasis on stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts and accretion phenomena. He is interested in understanding the physical processes that govern accretion onto relativistic objects such as black holes and neutron stars.

Josh Bloom, University of California Berkeley. Josh's primary interest is in gamma-ray bursts, and using GRBs as probes to study the universe, gaining unique insights into everything from the details of winds around massive stars to the nature of mysterious damped lyman-alpha systems to the redshift of reionization.

Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University. Priya works with gravitational lensing, probing the distribution of dark matter on galaxy and cluster scales; accretion physics, probing the accretion history of supermassive black holes, and the dynamics of gas flows in Active Galactic Nuclei and X-ray binaries; and galaxy formation, feedback processes from quasar outflows and supernovae in galaxy formation.

Eiichiro Komatsu, Univeristy of Texas, Austin. Eiichiro works with cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy and polarization; inflationary scenarios of the early universe; alternative theories of gravity; radio band observational cosmology. He is currently the director of the Texas Cosmology Center. In 2012 he takes up a a new position as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching, Germany.

Steven Allen, Stanford University.  Steve's primary research interests are X-ray astronomy and observational cosmology, studying the physics of galaxy clusters, supermassive black holes, dark matter and dark energy. Steve is associated with KIPAC (Kavli Institute for Particle Astrohysics and Cosmology).