Presented in partnership with Perth Observatory, TEDxPerth went to space. Sitting under the night sky we heard about astrogeology, zero G and the latest developments in telescopes.
Guest Curator & Speakers
Luke Davies
Project Scientist
Luke Davies
Project Scientist
Currently Project Scientist at ICRAR for the Wide Area VISTA Extragalactic Survey, Luke is working to understand the evolution of galaxies and the structure of the Universe over the last 8 billion years. Luke is also deputy lead of the ASKAP Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) key science project to explore the cosmic evolution of star-formation, an active member of the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey (CHILES) and Deep Investigations of Neutral Gas Origins (DINGO) survey.
Danail Obreschkow
Senior Research Fellow
Danail Obreschkow
Senior Research Fellow
Danail’s core areas of research include galaxy evolution, star formation, as well as cosmic large-scale structure. Over the last decade, Danail developed new models for the evolution of cold gas in galaxies, highly relevant to modern observations and future surveys on the Square Kilometre Array telescope. More recently, Danail and his collaborators made fundamental discoveries on the connection between galactic angular momentum and the internal physics of galaxies; and his team also demonstrated the use of new statistical tools to extract information about the cosmos from the large-scale distribution of galaxies in space.
Garth Illingworth
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Garth Illingworth
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Garth is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley, the Deputy-Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and in 2010 was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree at the University of Western Australia. He is the recipient of the 2016 American Astronomical Society Lancelot M. Berkeley New York Community Trust Prize for his work on the most-distant galaxies viewed with Hubble, and was a plenary speaker for this award at the 2017 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. He was the 2018 Bahcall Lecturer, giving a series of invited talks at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Gretchen Benedix
Cosmic Mineralogist and Astro-Geologist
Gretchen Benedix
Cosmic Mineralogist and Astro-Geologist
Gretchen is a cosmic mineralogist/astro-geologist using the chemistry, mineralogy, spectroscopy and petrology of meteorites to understand the formation and evolution of asteroids and other planets. She has worked at both the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and The Natural History Museum in London as a researcher. She joined Curtin University in 2012 as a Senior Lecturer and was awarded a Senior Curtin Research Fellowship in 2014. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.